A reality check
Lord (Nigel) Lawson, and others, undertook sceptical critiques of Stern's work in the journal, World Economics. Sir Nicholas can hardly complain that these arguments came from trivial sources: he is on the editorial board of World Economics. [Link]

Indeed, Stern was launched at the end of a several month period during which Tony Blair's own advisers and their acolytes amongst broadcasters started to develop a more realistic discussion of policy. David King himself seemed to say, in a BBC Radio 4 Today broadcast in 14 April 2006, that even a good deal of policy success could not fend off quite severe climate change. So the core problem is to know whether policy advocates believe a little pain could bring a great gain, or not. This is not the place to recount the ins and outs of these arguments. [[8]] The point here is to show the gap between the rhetoric and reality of Mr Blair's Messiah Politics. Even more, to point out the gaps between his own various utterances: between his high-flown and his expedient rhetorics.

By 2007, Mr Blair's views on climate change were of small interest to anyone. Gordon Brown, on whom attention was focused, declared himself a fan of action and (as was predictable) has done little that was very Stern-like. "Green taxes" as a percentage of the total tax-take have fallen under New Labour's decade in power and in his 2007 budget Gordon Brown did little to make up the ground. [Link] He is reported to have crushed some unrealistic policy ideas of David Miliband, the environment secretary. Instead, Brown made a shrewd move. In March 2007, he proposed that there should be statutory (legally-binding) targets for the phased reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, and that they should follow independent advice (from a body with no power). Like his much-vaunted independence for the Bank of England, this neatly shifted blame for any policy failure away from himself. But this climate change device was deftly shifty, since no law can ever bind future Parliaments. Stern had done the politicians one big favour. By stressing how important international action was, he allowed the UK to shelter behind the inadequacies of the EU and nearly everyone else too.

The collision of virtues
Of course, Mr Blair's Messiah Politics on climate change are wholly irreconcilable with his Messiah Politics on global poverty. Leave aside the poverty of argument in much of the global-warming alarmism and the policy suggested to tackle it, there is simply no chance that the poor of the world can become much less poor without huge amounts of greenhouse gases being unleashed. This problem is what one might call a "collision of virtues". Stern's answer to the tension between his two agendas seems mostly to be that the rich world should pay for the poor world to grow in a post-carbon way. That may well be morally right, but it begs one of the large questions which Stern raises but doesn't begin to address: Is there any sign at all that the world's publics are willing to do anything inconvenient or costly about climate change? Another question matters too: Does anyone seriously believe Stern when he says that 1 percent of GDP will solve the problem? If it were true, then our problems are nearly over. Nearly, but not quite. Compared with our expenditure on health (about 8 percent of GDP), or education (about 5 percent), this may seem like small beer. Still it's well over double what we currently spend on overseas aid (0.4 percent, though Blair promised it would soon be 0.7 percent). And this, remember, from a kindly country whose extraordinary toleration of high taxes seems to be close to its limit.

Climate change becomes popular
Blair's snake oil Messiah Politics on climate change were surprisingly mainstream. It's a subject that had galvanised our political masters a decade before he came to power. The idea that mankind may be over-heating his planet through the emission of greenhouse gases hit the mainstream in the late 1980s. It immediately found a champion in the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who thereby endorsed and licensed the enthusiasm of successive environment ministers and their officials for the subject. Lord Lawson told Martin Durkin, the film-maker, that she did so as a way of promoting the nuclear power whose success would lessen the country's dependence on the Middle East and the miners. [[9]]

The upshot was that the largest, most complicated, most life-changing idea of our time was given a berth at the heart of British politics, driven by the newly emboldened officials in that least powerful of departments.

In the Late Blair period, in September 2004, the PM said he thought global warming mattered enormously. [Link] That December, he declared himself a disciple of everything Professor Sir David King, the official chief scientist, had been saying, presumably including the latter's increasingly intemperate utterances about the turpitude of the US and Mr Bush. Reality kicked in a fortnight or so later at Davos, an annual corporate and government jamboree at which important people promise to listen to their inner voices, become inclusive and caring and so on. [Link] Mr Blair chose this moment to reiterate how important global warming was, and then said that no measures could be taken which seriously threatened economic growth. By suggesting that this is the one immutable fact of political life, Tony Blair was leaving open whether he thought that, in dealing with global warming, Westerners were up for great changes in their way of life, or whether - quite differently - climate change could be tackled without such changes.