Emissions control - we have a problem

Listening to today's news, I've been hugely impressed to hear about a group of people successfully doing something difficult and complex. I was less impressed to hear another group of people talking about doing something about a difficult and complex problem - and coming up with what seems to be an unworkably difficult and complex solution.

The difficult and complex thing was actually achieved by NASA's Mars Phoenix lander team, who successfully landed their probe on the Arctic plains of Mars. It's an immense technical achievement - anyone who thinks it's an easy thing to do should consider the number of failed attempts to land probes on Mars - the former Soviet Union made several attempts but never quite managed it, whilst NASA lost the previous probe intended to explore the polar regions of Mars - hence the fact that this probe is called Phoenix. Not to mention our own plucky little Beagle 2 probe, lost somewhere in the Isidis Planitia basin on Christmas Day 2003. All in all, I think that more than half of all Mars missions (landers and orbiters) have failed.

Although it was a difficult task, they did it and as I post, Phoenix is unpacking its chemistry set in preparation for a little lab work on a frozen plain 680 million kilometers from Earth. At mission control and various other locations all over the world where the probe was built, tested and launched, where the experiments were devised and built, where the mission was planned, there must be thousands of people whose sense of job satisfaction and achievement is currently soaring into the stratosphere like a rocket. Congratulations and good luck to 'em all, I say.

Back in Blighty, our Parliament's Environmental Audit Committee has been looking at the problem of climate change, and has come up with what looks to me like an unworkably complex system of personal carbon credits, which people would be supposed to trade in order to concentrate their minds on saving carbon and, they hope, the planet. For once, H M Government have recognised a money pit before they have dropped any cash into it and rejected the idea - for now, at least.

Climate change and related problems are difficult, that much is certain. But it's about the only thing about the subject which is certain. A tiny minority of experts say that climate change caused by human activities doesn't exist at all. The majority feel that the evidence for human-generated change is overwhelming, but exactly how serious the situation is and how to tease out the signal of what we as a species are doing from the noisy background of fluctuations to which the climate has always been subject, are hotly debated.

I don't have the expertise or depth of reading in the subject to have a strongly-held view on how serious man-made climate change is. I tend to believe that the majority of climate scientists who believe they've detected changes are probably right. I don't have the training or knowledge to comment on the degree of seriousness, but tend towards the precautionary principle - if we're not sure what we are doing, or how serious the consequences may be, best to try and minimise our impact on the atmosphere to be on the safe side. We've only got one planet (there are others, but take a look at the pictures from Mars - even if we could send a few shiploads of colonists there after trashing our own planet, Mars looks, in estate agents' jargon, "in need of some renovation" before they could move in).

If those were the only considerations, I'd be a bit of a wishy-washy fence-sitter on the subject. But potential climate change isn't the only problem with fossil fuels. They're also finite. We know that we've used up a lot of the stuff in the ground and nobody knows how much is left, or how hard it will be to get out.

Most of the world doesn't even know how much we've already got out of the ground - there are rumours that the Saudis have been overstating their oil reserves for years. The exact figures and dates don't matter - we might reach 'peak oil' in five months, five years or fifty years - heck, we might have already got there for all that I know. What does matter is that the stuff which powers our civilisation, that keeps those of us in the First World relatively comfortable, that powers most of the food production which feeds most of the world is a dwindling resource. If it runs out before the human race has come up with practical alternative methods of generating energy, then we'll be faced with a catastrophe which will make the acts of terrorism which have panicked so many governments in recent years seem like a minor detail - not a few hundred or thousands of deaths, but millions of our six-billion-plus global population dying of hunger, whilst the lives of many others will be miserable and filled with poverty, hunger hardship and insecurity.

Things would getting bad even before such an apocalypse in a world where the last of the energy resources are held by some of the most unpleasant and oppressive regimes on earth think about all the oil in Saudi and Iran, for example, or the way that the relatively liberal, open societies of Western Europe are becoming dependent on an increasingly authoritarian Russia for gas supplies - we are not in a good place, people.

So, serious climate change or no, I'd definitely come down on the side of those who say we need to change our ways. But individual carbon credits? I just can't see it myself.

Firstly, the bureaucracy involved would be immense. At the very least, we'd probably need a database with details of every household in the UK to keep track of people's credits. The government's record in managing IT projects has been pretty uninspiring, to say the least - cost over-runs, systems not delivered in time or on budget, lost data.... Best not to go there at all unless you really, positively need that database.... The committee tacitly admitted that government IT delivery would be a fatal problem, by suggesting that the system was outsourced to private companies, on the grounds that private business was good at running big databases - the example of supermarket loyalty card schemes was cited.

I'm not convinced that moving the IT into the private sector is any guarantee of success here. A supermarket runs a customer database out of self-interest - to market to customers, to tie them in to shopping at that supermarket. A private contractor selling a service to the government is also acting out of self-interest - it will want as much of the taxpayer's money as it can get out of the deal. Profit is the bottom line - the system will be only as good as it needs to be to get the business, as the contractor isn't a direct beneficiary of it being any better than adequate. If this was provided by the private sector, I suspect that it would be either a huge drain on the public purse, or a clunky system provided by the lowest bidder. Both, if we're really unlucky.

The carbon trading system would be flawed at a far more fundamental level than this, though. At one extreme, you could make it simple - a straightforward carbon allowance for every adult and child, to be traded as if each had an identical carbon footprint. This would make the administration easier, but would be grossly unfair, taking no account of, say, pensioners who stay in most of the day and need to keep the house warm, families with young children, who need to use a washing machine almost daily, people living in areas where there is not suitable bus or train service which they could switch to instead of making a car journey. You could adjust the system to take account of such factors, but that there are so many variables that you would end up either going for a relatively simple system which is unfair to many people, or one which is fairer, but horribly complex.

And would the trading work in the real world anyway? We've seen enough examples in recent months of financial institutions getting involved in complex and sophisticated trading, which all seemed to be going swimmingly for a time, until they became mired in their own complexity and fell apart, with institutions having to admit that things had gotten so complicated that they had no idea what liabilities they had taken on.

Reducing our dependence on fossil fuels and moving towards alternatives is probably more important than anything else governments, companies and citizens will have to do this century. It's a real future of civilization issue, even if you don't assume that the fossil fuels will cook the planet before they run out. But it strikes me that carbon trading's a dead end. The alternatives? Well, there are things like better planning of communities - trying to keep residential areas, commercial and industrial areas within reasonable distances, investing in public transport and cycle routes to connect the places people need to move to on a regular basis.

But mainly, I think it's a technical fix - somehow we need to eke out what remains of our non-renewables by moving to much more efficient ways of using them and develop new, sustainable, safe and affordable alternatives. Politicians can't legislate to create such breakthroughs, but what they can do is create an environment where the only people who can get us out of this mess - the scientists and engineers - have the best possible shot at it. In the UK we've been particularly bad at undervaluing these people, whilst throwing money at gamblers in the financial services industry who have lost billions for shareholders by getting involved in deals so complicated that they had no real idea what they were doing, then demanded billions from taxpayers to save them and the rest of the economy from the consequences of their actions.

Never mind the dodgy deals which nobody can understand, or trying to trade your way out of a mess. What we need to invest in are the technologies which might be our only hope for saving civilization as we know it. Invest in science eduction, engineering apprenticeships, R & D grants, doing whatever it takes to build, grow and support a science and engineering base which might actually get us safely to a post-fossil fuel world. Putting some real money in that direction instead of chucking it away on a Northern Rock - now if the committee had come up with something along those lines, the government might have been right to listen to them.

Of course, there's no guarantee that the right technologies are out there waiting to be discovered. If not, we're probably doomed, but I'm more optimistic - there are people out there with the imagination, intelligence and technical brilliance to put a mini laboratory down on the frozen polar regions of Mars. If we had more people like that, I think we could crack the coming energy crisis, too.