Leeds P&P hold Hilary Benn to account on climate change

Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for International Development, was put through his paces on Friday 9 February by People & Planet students challenging him on the energy and climate change policies of his department.

Hilary Benn at the meeting in Leeds

Hilary Benn listening to P&P students in Leeds

Hilary Benn considers what P&P has to say

At an hour-long meeting in Leeds students from the P&P group there presented the key Ditch Dirty Development demands, and handed over 576 ‘Dirty Money’ action cards, collected from across the country.

During the discussion, Hilary Benn accepted that the Department for International Development (DFID) are still in the process of getting their heads around climate change, and said that conversations like the one in Leeds helped him realise how far they still have to go. He also admitted that DFID “do need to be better as an organisation at monitoring the climate impact of projects we fund.” This is a crucial first step towards ending funding for climate-changing oil and gas projects.

The meeting, set up by Leeds People & Planet group, attracted 30 P&Pers from Leeds and other groups. Hilary Benn spent a whole hour listening to and discussing the key points of People & Planet’s Ditch Dirty Development campaign.

The meeting started with concise hard-hitting presentations from five of the Leeds P&Pers, including: * an introduction to the issue of energy, development and climate change * how funding fossil fuels contributes to climate change * how funding fossil fuels doesn’t help poverty reduction * the alternatives: decentralised and renewable energy * the campaign demands and the chance for DFID to lead the way to low carbon development.

Hilary Benn then gave his response to People & Planet, and answered questions P&P students put to him.

What Hilary Benn said:

• The secretary of State accepted the need for the government and for DFID to do more on climate change. He said that following the government White Paper, DFID was developing capacity to respond to climate change. In particular, he said “we do need to be better as an organisation at monitoring the climate impact of projects we fund.” This is a clear step forward for DFID — and seems to have happened in response to the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee report. DFID are piloting country specific measurement of the climate impacts of DFID’s programmes in a few countries.

• On climate change more generally, Hilary Benn argued that there is a need for a global framework under which our emissions will decrease, while giving scope for development in the developing world.

• Benn argued that the countries DFID deals with are sovereign powers, with their own priorities and ideas, so the UK cannot tell countries not to exploit fossil fuels in order to meet their need for energy. This was a clear theme running throughout Hilary Benn’s responses to the presentation and questions. He used the example of Malawi, a country he recently visited, where hydropower provides much of the electricity, but where there are some brown coal reserves, and posed the question of whether Malawi would be wrong to use their coal to meet their energy demand. As a bit of a rhetorical flourish, he said he’d rather P&P were talking to the Energy Minister of Malawi, rather than him.

• In a similar vein, Benn said the process by which the World Bank (WB) funds projects is reactive, not proactive. The Bank can only fund projects that are proposed by developing countries, and he argued that developing countries would object to the WB not funding oil projects if they propose them.

• Hilary Benn was keen to stress that DFID cannot solve these problems alone — he talked a lot about the need for a global framework to deal with climate change and the need to raise awareness in the developing world. He used the example of China — about how they are simultaneously lifting people out of poverty, building new power stations, and addressing climate change — his point was that the movement towards renewables and energy efficiency is coming from within China, not being imposed from outside.

• In response to questions about the ‘resource curse’, and in particular the case of Nigeria (which was used in the presentations), Hilary Benn focused on the question of governance. He argued that fossil fuels are not the issue per se, but that the problem is one of inadequate governance — where governance is poor, oil is likely to be a curse. He used the comparison of Norway, which has fossil fuels but also democracy and good governance and has not suffered from the resource curse.

• In connection to Nigeria, Hilary Benn talked about the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) and how DFID is trying to persuade companies and governments to sign up to report revenues and payments, to improve accountability and ensure that oil revenues are put towards poverty reduction. However, he agreed that the EITI does not tackle climate change as this is not its aim, it is rather about addressing the resource curse.

• Benn also claimed that oil revenues can be important sources of funding for education and other services. When challenged (“but does this really happen?”), he responded “yes, it does in some cases” but moved on quickly without specifying where.

• He also mentioned the World Bank’s Clean Energy Investment Framework and how DFID are pushing to increase capacity in alternative energy. Yet, when asked why World Bank funding for ‘new renewables’ actually decreased from 2005 to 2006, he was unable to answer (instead he challenged the definition on why it excludes large hydro power).

• He agreed that there is a need to diversify economies away from oil, but that this requires developing conditions in order to move to low-carbon economies (e.g. a global climate change or emissions framework, greater awareness and capacity).

• On decentralised energy, Benn didn’t have such a clear line. He argued that centralised systems do work, but mostly examples from the UK. He used the ‘governments can’t do it on their own’ line, and said that in the UK people need to be able to choose microgeneration. Overall, he fell back on the ‘can’t tell people what to do’ argument by saying, we can’t walk into a country and say ‘you should have lots of decentralised energy’.

For more information, read DFID’s position and P&P’s response to it.