Abstract
Tony Blair and the Labour Party shunned nuclear power. Then Sir David King became Britain's chief scientific adviser.
Tony blair sat in the downing street garden with some of his most trusted aides, mulling over the forthcoming August 2002 Johannesburg Earth Summit. The Johannesburg agenda was complex, covering issues ranging from global poverty to environmental degradation. And with speakers such as Nelson Mandela, Robert Mugabe, and Colin Powell, Blair wondered how he could make his mark.
As Liz Lloyd, then Blair's environment minister, and Andrew Neather, his speechwriter, batted around ideas, Blair grew more and more impatient. “Why can't I just say we're in favor of nuclear power to solve the problem?” he asked.
The comment shocked and appalled Neather, whom Blair had hired to write his so-called green speeches concerning the environment on the back of a previous career as a campaigner at Friends of the Earth. It stunned Lloyd as well. “Please don't say that,” she begged.
What proved so astonishing was that Blair's comment represented a complete reversal of all his previous statements. Back in 1987, while serving as the shadow energy secretary, Blair had repeatedly spoken out against nuclear power. In response to the Conservative government's proposals for more nuclear plants, he had said:
“It need only be said that not only is such [thinking] utterly impracticable–as to swap from coal to nuclear would mean building nuclear power stations at a rate that not even Lord Marshall [then the head of Britain's nationalized power industry] foresees–but radioactive waste is itself a major environmental problem. And one for which we have no easy answer at present.”
Blair's comments regarding the government's proposal to subsidize the nuclear industry were even more damning: “When we consider these new issues on the horizon and appreciate what a real agenda for a modern energy policy for Britain will contain, we see that it is not just the cost that the consumer will pay; it is not just the burden that the country will bear; it is the sheer, breathtaking irrelevance of these proposals to modern issues of today.”
In the years since, Blair and the Labour Party hierarchy repeated much of the same mantra over and over again. They reinforced the message in their environmental manifesto, “In Trust for Tomorrow,” published shortly before Labour took power in 1997. The manifesto said that the party saw no economic justification for a new generation of nuclear power plants–a view that successive reviews and the government's own 2003 Energy white paper confirmed.
Somewhere between 1997 and 2002 then, Blair underwent a radical conversion. An industry that was synonymous in Britain with super-secrecy, technical incompetence, and never-ending demands for subsidy suddenly became the party leadership's darling.
What happened? Who was responsible for this damascene conversion? Blair never did dare proselytize the nuclear industry in his Johannesburg speech, but as news of his conversion filtered out, many of the green movement's accusatory fingers began to point in one direction–toward Sir David King, Blair's chief scientific adviser.
“[King] moves very quietly, but he makes sure he knows all the right people and sits on all the right committees,” says one senior Cambridge colleague. “He takes the time to do that when other people might not. He's very skilled at university politics.”
Up until then, King's prominence had attracted little attention outside of scientific circles, yet his ardently pro-nuclear views were helping rewrite government policy and reviving a debate and industry that the environmental movement thought it had beaten years before. It was a spectacular coup. And what shocked the greens the most was how little they knew about King.
At first glance, Sir David King seems like a very conventional scientist. Born in South Africa in 1939, his parents raised him in Johannesburg and expected him to move into the family paint-making business. But a spell in the company's paint laboratory sparked an interest in science instead. After watching his father's scientists create formulae for paints, pigments, and drying times, King, too, wanted to become a researcher. As he progressed through school–eventually earning a doctorate in chemistry–his father hoped he'd return to the family firm as a paint chemist. It was wishful thinking. Academically, King succeeded, but he riled the South African authorities.
Those were the days–in the early 1960s–when South Africa's apartheid regime took on all the attributes of a police state. Nelson Mandela's arrest in 1962 came at a time when armed police patrolled many campuses, including University of the Witwatersrand where King gained his PhD the following year. Like many students, King became highly politicized by this febrile atmosphere, but by an unusual route. He didn't awake politically through an emotional reaction to the oppression of others; instead, the scientific method led him to conclude that the government's actions were wrong and that he must speak out. “The evidence-led logical approach I have to things meant that I was affronted by the system there,” he remarked in a September 2005 interview at the Institute of International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. “It was very apparent to me, for example, that the man in the kitchen of our family home was extremely intelligent, and yet his position in society could never reflect that.” (King declined the Bulletin's requests for an interview.)
Once he formed such views, the young King felt duty-bound to make them known. So, regardless of consequence, he began writing letters to newspapers. When the government told him to stop, he refused. Later, the authorities called him in for a long interview, during which it became clear that King was unable to keep his ideas about South African politics to himself. When government officials suggested he leave the country, King took the advice.
He ended up in Britain, where he rapidly advanced up the academic ladder. He held posts at Imperial College London, Liverpool University, and Cambridge University, where he became professor of physical chemistry in 1988 and served as head of the chemistry department from 1993 to 2000. His work reflected many of the early interests he developed in his parent's paint laboratory, as he focused on the interactions between solid surfaces with liquids and gases. His PhD was on catalysis, especially the synthesis of ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen.
King has summarized his career as a pursuit to resolve chemistry by finding out what's happening at ever-more basic levels. “I've always moved–or I did the first 10 or 15 years–toward a more theoretical, more complete analysis of water surfaces and dealing with it at the atomic and electronic level,” he told the Berkeley audience. “Today, we have a laboratory that combines state-ofthe-art quantum theory with state-of-the-art instruments. The objective is to get back to more complex phenomena but with a sound base.”
For a chemist, this might be exciting stuff. But in Britain, dozens of other top-flight chemists and physicists possess similarly impressive academic records. So how did King emerge from potential academic obscurity into the political limelight?
Working at Cambridge helped. Along with Oxford University and Imperial College London, Cambridge exercises an iron grip on Britain's scientific establishment, which ensures that few important posts go to those from outside the “magic triangle.” King was also a senior member of several eminent learned societies, where he had plenty of chances to mix with people such as Sir Bob May, his predecessor as the government's chief scientist. Members of such societies are the people ministers sound out when filling vacant government posts.
King's networking and social skills also played a critical role. “He moves very quietly, but he makes sure he knows all the right people and sits on all the right committees,” says one senior Cambridge colleague. “He takes the time to do that when other people might not. He's very skilled at university politics.”
From 1988 to 2000, such skills saw him elected as a fellow of two prestigious Cambridge colleges (St. John's and Queen's), and he became a master of another (Downing). He also held senior positions in the Royal Society of Chemistry. But outside of academia, King remained an obscure figure. When Blair appointed him chief scientific officer in 2000, there was minimal press comment. Even Nature, a prominent British journal, published only a relatively short article, briefly pointing out that King lacked “experience in policy making.” King himself has admitted that he accepted the post with “no idea” how to translate complex scientific ideas into terms politicians could understand.
But within a few months, all that changed. The arrival of foot-and-mouth disease on British farms in spring 2001 provided King with his first great trial. Britain has long dealt with foot-and-mouth outbreaks, so a large scientific and veterinary establishment stands ready to fight new ones. Over the years, the government developed policies based on slaughtering infected animals while vaccinating and containing healthy ones.
King rode roughshod over that policy in 2001. Applying the same logical evidence-based approach that led to his expulsion from South Africa, he developed a draconian slaughter policy that saw every farm animal slaughtered across swathes of Britain. “I sat like everybody else watching this epidemic develop,” he said at Berkeley. “About two weeks in, I got data from the Ministry of Agriculture and called in a group of epidemic modelers. Based on the models, I could see that with the control procedures we had in place then, the epidemic was actually out of control. So I had to go to the prime minister and express that view.”
During that conversation, King also promised Blair that if he followed King's recommendations, the epidemic could be brought under control within days. Blair had little choice. He could not afford a countryside in turmoil in a year he planned to hold a general election. Nor could he take the political risk of ignoring his top scientist. He gave King and his modelers a free hand.
To many farmers and senior veterinarians, what followed seemed to be the most unnecessary slaughter of animals ever seen in Britain. About 2.4 million animals were killed in 11 weeks, with the nation's television screens displaying nightly shots of burning pyres. By contrast, Britain's 1967 epidemic–when more confirmed cases were reported–saw just 434,000 animals culled over 32 weeks. King's men wiped out the disease much faster, but at a huge price.
That said, King's decision also allowed the countryside to return to normal, saving many rural businesses whose collective value was far higher than those of the ruined farms. More importantly, though, King demonstrated how a confident chief scientist could provide both tough policies and the excuses necessary to do things that might otherwise seem impossible. Many believe his success in dealing with this great disaster allowed King to push climate change–along with the nuclear industry's rebirth–up the British government's agenda.
Better still, he began to understand how to communicate with the politicians he was tasked with informing. “In dealing with science and presenting it to politicians, what is critically important is doing it in simple words. Blair is a barrister and has the kind of mind that likes to take ownership of what you're telling him. So I might talk to him for 40 minutes. At the end, he stops me and then goes back over what I have told him to see if he's taken ownership of it,” he explained at Berkeley. “My basic message is that by using an evidence-based approach, scientists can now tackle enormously complex things.”
Here, it's important for some perspective. Climate change concerned Britain for many years before King's arrival. In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, as Conservative prime minister and a trained chemist, led the world in warning of climate change's dangers. The British public is also generally well informed about such issues, and the country has a long history of green activism. On the scientific research side, Britain contains top research institutions such as the government's Hadley Centre, which plays a leading international role in climate science.
Despite all of this, the politics of climate change resided in the doldrums in Britain six years ago. A tax on fuel imposed by the previous government had, under Labour, sparked a rebellion by the nation's truckers, who came within days of cutting off the nation's food and fuel supplies in 2000. By the time King took office, Blair and his fellow ministers didn't have the stomach for any further climate change action that risked provoking similar backlashes.
King was less concerned about bringing the issue to the fore. He arrived in office already sure that climate change constituted the biggest threat facing the world, and he saw convincing Blair of this as one of his most important tasks. Opportunity knocked in 2002 when he “engineered” the opportunity to give the prestigious Zuckerman Lecture–a yearly address to the British scientific community organized by the British Association for the Advancement of Science–choosing climate change as his topic. “My lecture went around the cabinet and many influential people in British government,” he said in a February 2006 interview with the online environment journal Grist. “The most important turning point was the decision Blair made very quickly after that to look at the U.K.'s energy policy in light of global warming science.”
Soon, King's concerns started popping up in Blair's green speeches, where he began referring to climate change in increasingly apocalyptic terms. By 2003, Blair even pledged that Britain would cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 60 percent by 2050.
King was working on other fronts, too, briefing opposition party leaders to convince them that climate change represented an issue that transcended party boundaries. “I have been questioned by the leaders of the opposition in private, and they quite clearly now accept the arguments,” he told the Berkeley audience. “We have managed a consensus.”
More to come? Chapelcross nuclear facility lets off steam.
The normally reticent King then went public. In 2004, he wrote a scathing article in Science, attacking the United States–and by implication, President George W. Bush–for failing to take climate change seriously. “In my view, climate change is the most severe problem we are facing today, more serious than even the threat of terrorism,” he wrote.
When a radio interviewer asked for evidence supporting his claims, King responded that his concerns were backed by “the number of fatalities that had already occurred,” implying his belief that global warming has already killed far more people than terrorism.
By the spring of 2004, King's proselytizing created jitters within Blair's staff. Ivan Rogers, Blair's principal private secretary, even sent King a note telling him to limit his contact with the media. It didn't work. At the 2004 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Seattle, where King spoke, someone left a computer disk with the Rogers memo and other private documents in the meeting's press room. The incident garnered King even more publicity.
Before long, King was attracting the ire of U.S. conservatives, some of whom see climate change as a global plot to stifle the U.S. economy. When the BBC invited Myron Ebell, the director of energy and global warming policy at the Washington-based Competitive Enterprise Institute, onto its prestigious Today radio program, he used it as a platform to attack King as a mere chemist who “knew nothing about climate science.” King retorted that Ebell might work for a “right-wing think tank–but there isn't much thinking going on” and pointed out that Ebell wasn't a scientist of any kind. He is equally contemptuous of Michael Crichton, the popular science fiction author who believes climate change is grossly overstated, a position Crichton outlined in his novel Fear. “This man is a fiction writer, and this is another example of fiction at work,” King told the Independent in January 2005.
For Britain's green movement, this all seemed wondrously fortuitous. But, of course, it came with a catch. Alongside King's warnings about climate change, he promoted a solution that no one expected–nuclear power. “Deploying a range of technologies to radically decarbonize our energy system over just a few decades is a challenge that should not be underestimated,” he remarked in Grist. “We need every tool in the bag to address it. Even taking the most optimistic projections, dramatic investments in energy efficiency and renewables will not be enough. So I believe the government is now right to revisit the question of new nuclear.”
Nuclear appears to solve two great problems, especially for politicians–energy security and emissions reduction. This simplistic thinking dominates the British public debate and casts King as staunchly pro-nuclear. But when analyzing King's comments, it's not so simple.
First, some figures. In Britain, power generation accounts for about one-third of the country's 670 million metric tons of annual carbon dioxide emissions. Nuclear power provides about 5 percent of the nation's total energy needs. This means building new nuclear plants–even doubling capacity–only makes a small contribution to carbon reduction. In fact, with energy demand growing at 1-2 percent per year, it might only meet the extra demand.
King recognizes this, pushing for a holistic energy policy that contains a raft of measures that prioritizes energy conservation, renewable power sources, and carbon sequestration. But the fact that he includes nuclear as part of the solution overshadows his other proposed fixes. “Sir David King has lost his bottle,” environmental activist George Monbiot wrote in a sharply titled Guardian piece, “The Chief Scientific Adviser has Become a Government Spin Doctor,” in which he claimed King was only pushing nuclear for political reasons.
It's a claim King resents. “For a sin of considering a solution not traditionally beloved of greens, I have been accused of abandoning my scientific principles for ‘political expediency,’” he countered in a sharply titled Guardian article of his own, “The Nuclear Option Isn't Political Expediency but Scientific Necessity.” “I find that offensive. Integrity is a scientist's most precious possession, and I have guarded mine carefully through 40 years of research… . Thus it is my scientific, not political, opinion that nuclear energy should be part of a wide portfolio of approaches.”
King is extremely contemptuous of Michael Crichton, the popular science fiction author who believes climate change is grossly overstated, a position Crichton outlined in his novel Fear. “This man is a fiction writer, and this is another example of fiction at work,” King told the Independent in January 2005.
And yet, King tends to emphasize the nuclear component of this portfolio. It's a familiar path for him. As in South Africa, the foot-and-mouth epidemic, and his warnings of global climate change, once King reaches a view, he seems compelled to evangelize it.
Take, for example, Britain's long-running debate about nuclear waste disposal. To date, there are hundreds of thousands of metric tons of nuclear waste in Britain, with more to come from soon-to-be decommissioned power plants. The government set up a Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) to conduct a public debate on the best means of long-term disposal.
CoRWM's answer: an underground repository, the clear favorite long before the committee reported its results in summer 2006. But the point of the exercise was to make that conclusion publicly acceptable by reaching it very openly, in hopes of undercutting the secrecy and evasion that characterized such debates in the past.
King, however, was impatient with the process and devoted some effort to undermining the committee and trying to hasten its conclusions. In November 2005, he told a private meeting organized by AMEC, the engineering conglomerate with high hopes of major contracts under a new nuclear program, that nonscientists dominated CoRWM and that it took too long to reach its decision. (He repeated these criticisms in offthe-record briefings with journalists and politicians.)
In that same speech he also put the first figures on how much nuclear energy Britain needed both today and in the future–a staggering 30-40 percent of the country's total power demand. In addition, he suggested siting future plants alongside existing ones, an odd idea given that most lie on the coast, where they would face the long-term risk of inundation from the very rising sea levels that climate change is supposed to bring. And perhaps most contentiously, he proposed that the government offer would-be nuclear power generators protection from fluctuating energy prices, maybe through some kind of subsidy or minimum price guarantee.
In Britain, a government scientist expressing his views so publicly or intervening so forcefully on policy is unprecedented. But King seems propelled by the idea that his own actions might make a real difference. So, like Al Gore, he's taken to the pulpit, delivering at least 150 public lectures around the world on global warming. His message is simple: The world is changing fast, and if humanity wants to preserve itself, let alone Earth, it better act fast and consider all options, no matter the preconceived notions. To King, it's elementary science.