Hedegaard: EU right even if climate science wrong

The European Union’s climate commissioner has said regardless of whether or not scientists are wrong on global warming, the EU is pursuing the correct energy policies.

Connie Hedegaard said that position was correct even if it lead to higher prices.

Ms Hedegaard’s comments come amidst claims the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is expected to admit that previous scientific predictions for global warming and the effects of carbon emissions have been proved to be inaccurate.

In an interview with British newspaper The Telegraph, Europe’s most senior climate change official argued that the current policies were the correct ones because a growing world population would put pressure on energy supplies regardless of the rate of global warming.

“I personally have a very pragmatic view,” Ms Hedegaard told The Telegraph.

“Say that 30 years from now, science came back and said, ‘wow, we were mistaken then now we have some new information so we think it is something else’.

“In a world with nine billion people, even 10 billion at the middle of this century, where literally billions of global citizens will still have to get out of poverty and enter the consuming middle classes, don’t you think that anyway it makes a lot of sense to get more energy and resource efficient,” she said.

“Let’s say that science, some decades from now, said ‘we were wrong, it was not about climate’, would it not in any case have been good to do many of things you have to do in order to combat climate change?”

The Telegraph reports the Danish commissioner also rejected public complaints over increases in electricity prices to subsidise renewable energies, such as wind farms, as unrealistic.

She said this was because increased competition over diminishing energy resources such as oil and gas would lead to higher bills.

“I believe that in a world with still more people, wanting still more growth for good reasons, the demand for energy, raw materials and resources will increase and so, over time so, over time, will the prices,” she said.

“I think we have to realise that in the world of the 21st century for us to have the cheapest possible energy is not the answer.”

The Telegraph reports Ms Hedegaard, and the European Commission, have not changed their position that the science that is currently used to justify EU climate change policy is “over 90 per cent” certain that global warming exists and that it is the result of human activity.

However The Telegraph says, EU and other policymakers are worried that the IPCC’s forthcoming admission, expected on September 27, that previous forecasts are wrong will damage the legitimacy of climate change policies, such as levies and fuel taxes on consumers to fund renewable energy.

The Telegraph says leaked IPCC reports, reviewing forecasts made in 2007, have called into question how much climate change has taken place by concluding that, even with a doubling of carbon emissions from 1990 levels, the global temperature has risen little or more slowly than predicted over the last 10-20 years.