LBC News

As the Iran crisis impacts global chokepoints, Laurie Laybourn tells LBC that Britain's fragile supply chains require a rapid improvement in domestic security, while the large carbon footprint of modern warfare will worsen climate change and the threat it poses.

Full Transcript:

James Hanson: Laurie Laybourn is Executive Director of the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative. Laurie, thanks for joining us. There are some who argue that given the energy price spike caused by the war in the Middle East, this would be a good time to grant new oil and gas licenses, for example, in the North Sea. Do you agree?

Laurie: No. Mainly because we are exposed to international markets. So oil and gas extracted in the context of the UK is then sold at similar prices, will go to where people then want to buy it. So what we need instead is electricity, energy production that's happening for us, by us, and therefore can be much more secure.

James Hanson: Isn't the problem with that, though, and the switch towards renewables, it takes time and it is expensive for consumers, initially at least?

Laurie: I mean, it of course takes time, but some of these things can be done very quickly. It is relatively easy to deploy certain renewables. For example, in Germany, there is this craze of balcony solar as they put it, where people pop down to their local Lidl or Aldi and they're able to actually buy some solar panels for a relatively low price and then pop it, in their case, on balconies or other places. And I know that the UK government is looking at enabling that here in the UK. It takes a long time to be identifying, extracting, moving oil and gas, even if, again, we didn't have this international market. So when it comes to the speed of deployment of things, renewables are pretty good on that front as well. And of course, when it comes to the actual price of things like solar panels, they are at record low and in many cases are far lower than their fossil fuel alternatives.

James Hanson: And so is your argument really that if we want to avoid the fallout from energy price spikes like the one we're seeing at the moment, we need to stop our reliance on fossil fuels?

Laurie: I mean, we cannot be in the absurd situation where our national security, right, we're not talking here about climate change or Greta Thunberg or whatever, where our national security is at the behest of whether someone invades a country in the Middle East, whether another country shuts down a certain choke point, whether Russia decides to invade Ukraine. We're in this extraordinary situation where our national security around energy is highly dependent on these fossil fuels which are being disrupted time and time again. We're in the situation where in a matter of a few years, we've had almost two once-in-a-lifetime energy security shocks. So this is a, this is an issue really of national security now and we need to move towards energy supply that enables us to be more secure and renewables absolutely do provide that opportunity for us.

James Hanson: Yeah, you mentioned previous energy price shocks, of course in 2022 after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we saw a big increase in energy prices globally. Do you think we've learned enough lessons from that?

Laurie: In some ways, there has been more of an effort to make the UK have a more reliable and secure energy system. The current government, for example, has of course been pushing hard on scaling renewables up. But then in other ways, no, we haven't gone as fast as we could have on that. We've also not gone as far as we could have on reducing our need for energy in the first place. And of course, insulation of our buildings is a key way to do that. That's just a win-win. You have lower energy bills, you'll use less energy, and that will just make us more secure. And then we will still continue to use gas at least for the foreseeable future and we haven't done enough to ensure that supplies of gas that back up stocks of gas have been filled up. And I think that's partly a problem with the fact that often, at least in Britain, we've left that to the private sector. In the past, that might have worked for us, but going forward, because this is about national security, we are going to have to, I think, have a situation where the government is providing some of those stockpiles to protect us in volatile times.

James Hanson: Yeah, how best do you think consumers can be protected right now, especially people in rural areas, for example, who are especially reliant on heating oil?

Laurie: Yeah, and I live in a rural area and we know lots of people who have been affected in that way because those prices are of course spiking hugely right now. I think in the immediate term, if and when this gets even worse, the government is going to have to consider providing support to some of those households like happened in the past with the 2022 energy shock. But as I say, going forward, the best thing it can do is deal with the problem at source, which is to move us towards sources of fuels and energy and electricity that mean that we aren't reliant on these volatile fossil fuel prices. Now that of course is going to be hard. Not all homes can be retrofitted in the way we need, but they might be able to have more insulation and that could be achieved if we supported those households. So I'm not saying any of this is pain-free, but what we can say is that the current pain being enacted on us by our reliance on volatile fossil fuels is pretty high and we're going to have to seek alternatives. One last thing to add there is that some of the government's advisers on issues around energy and climate the other day did the figures and they found out that just one energy shock of the scale that we saw in 2022 costs about the same, right, this is amazing, about the same as it would cost to get the whole country to net zero. So it shows you how much the pain, the scale of pain that's being enacted on us by these volatile energy shocks that we now're seeming to have every few years.

James Hanson: Laurie, thank you so much for your time. Laurie Laybourn there, Executive Director of the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative.