Climate Change | Munk Debates

Elizabeth May

"We need to look at all of Canada’s priorities, but we must address the climate crisis . . . if we fail to address it, nothing else we do makes any difference."

Elizabeth May is Leader of the Green Party of Canada and is an environmentalist, writer, activist and lawyer active in the environmental movement since 1970.  Before winning the leadership in 2006, she was the Executive Director of the Sierra Club of Canada.

Elizabeth is a graduate of Dalhousie Law School and was admitted to the Bar in both Nova Scotia and Ontario. She has held the position of Associate General Council for the Public Interest Advocacy Centre, representing consumer, poverty and environment groups in her work in 1985-86.  In 1986, Elizabeth became Senior Policy Advisor to then federal Environment Minister, Tom McMillan.

She first became known in the Canadian media in the mid-1970s through her leadership as a volunteer in the grassroots movement against aerial insecticide spraying proposed for forests near her home on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.  Her volunteer work also included successful campaigns to prevent approval of uranium mining in Nova Scotia, and extensive work on energy policy issues, primarily opposing nuclear energy. 

Elizabeth is the author of seven books, Budworm Battles (1982), Paradise Won: The Struggle to Save South Moresby (1990), At the Cutting Edge: The Crisis in Canada’s Forests (Key Porter Books, 1998, as well as a major new edition in 2004), co-authored with Maude Barlow, Frederick Street; Life and Death on Canada’s Love Canal (Harper Collins, 2000), How to Save the World in Your Spare Time (Key Porter Books, 2006), Global Warming for Dummies (co-authored with Zoe Caron, John Wiley and Sons, 2008) and most recently Losing Confidence: Power, Politics and the Crisis in Canadian Democracy, (MacLelland and Stewart, 2009). 

She has served on numerous boards of environmental groups and advisory bodies to universities and governments in Canada, including the Earth Charter Commission, co-chaired by Maurice Strong and Mikhail Gorbachev. Elizabeth is the recipient of many awards including the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Sierra Club in 1989, the International Conservation Award from the Friends of Nature, the United Nations Global 500 Award in 1990 and named one of the world’s leading women environmentalists by the United Nations in 2006. In 1996, she was presented with the award for Outstanding Leadership in Environmental Education by the Ontario Society for Environmental Education. She is also the recipient of the 2002 Harkin Award from the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS). In 2006, Elizabeth was presented with the prestigious Couchiching award for excellence in public policy.

Elizabeth was named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2005. She is a mother and grandmother.

George Monbiot

"The real costs of climate change are not measured in dollars and pounds, the real costs are measured in lives and in ecosystems . . . immeasurable."

George Monbiot is an author, Guardian columnist and environmental campaigner. His best-selling books include Feral: Rewilding the land, sea and human life and Heat: how to stop the planet burning; his latest is Out of the Wreckage: a new politics for an age of crisis. George cowrote the concept album Breaking the Spell of Loneliness with musician Ewan McLennan; and has made a number of viral videos. One of them, adapted from his 2013 TED talk, How Wolves Change Rivers, has been viewed on YouTube over 40m times. Another, on Natural Climate Solutions, that he co-presented with Greta Thunberg, has been watched over 50m times.

Bjørn Lomborg

". . . we are knowingly squandering colossal sums of money (on climate change) while fractional sums can save millions of lives right now."

Dr. Bjørn Lomborg researches the smartest ways to do good. With his think tank, the Copenhagen Consensus, he has worked with hundreds of the world’s top economists and seven Nobel Laureates to find and promote the most effective solutions to the world’s greatest challenges, from disease and hunger to climate and education.
 
For his work, Lomborg was named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. He is a visiting fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and is a frequent commentator in print and broadcast media, for outlets including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, CNN, FOX, and the BBC. His monthly column is published in many languages by dozens of influential newspapers across all continents.

He is a best-selling author, whose books include False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cool It, How to Spend $75 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, The Nobel Laureates' Guide to the Smartest Targets for the World 2016-2030 and Prioritizing Development: A Cost Benefit Analysis of the UN's SDGs.

Lord Nigel Lawson

"We have entered a new age of unreason which threatens to be as economically harmful as it is disquieting. It is from this, above all, that we need to save the planet."

Lord Nigel Lawson, Baron Lawson of Blaby, was Chancellor of the Exchequer between June 1983 and October 1989.  Lord Lawson is currently Chairman of Oxford Investment Partners, majority owned by a number of leading Oxford Colleges, and also of Central Europe Trust, an advisory and private equity firm focused on Central and Eastern Europe. He is the immediate past President of the British Institute of Energy Economics. Most recently his major interest has been the economics and politics of global warming, about which he has written a best-selling book, An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, which has made him a prominent and high profile climate change skeptic.

Educated at Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford, Lawson had a distinguished career as a journalist before entering parliament. After ten years as a financial journalist he was appointed editor of the Spectator in 1966, a post he held for four years.

In 1981 he entered the Cabinet as Energy Secretary and in 1983 he began a six-year stint as Chancellor of the Exchequer. He set about simplifying the tax system and reducing the level of direct taxation, actions that made him popular with both the party and the Prime Minister. 

Lawson was a key proponent of the Thatcher Government's privatization policy. During his tenure at the Department of Energy he set the course for the later privatizations of the gas and electricity industries and on his return to the Treasury he worked closely with the Department of Trade and Industry in privatizing British Airways and British Telecom.

After the government's re-election in 1983, Lawson was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer.  The trajectory taken by the UK economy from this point on is typically described as 'The Lawson Boom' by analogy with the phrase 'The Barber Boom' which describes an earlier period of rapid expansion under the tenure as chancellor of Anthony Barber in the conservative government of Edward Heath. 

After leaving government, Lawson took a life peerage as Lord Lawson of Blaby, accepted a directorship of Barclays Bank and wrote his memoirs, The View from Number 11.