The former Conservative Chancellor Nigel Lawson made a sceptical and profoundly controversial foray into environmentalism earlier this year with the publication of his book, An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming, which argued against the accepted views on global warming and the increasing fears which surround the issue.

In this week's interview for The Green Rush, Times Online's series on business and the environment, he outlines his position, arguing that global warming is treated as if it was "a new religion", rather than being considered in rational terms.

"I do think, because this is a very important issue, because anything we do about it is going to have huge economic consequences, we really do need to approach the subject coolly and calmly and rationally," he says.

Lord Lawson, who served as Margaret Thatcher's energy minister, and then as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1983 to 1989, says that the onus is on politicians and governments first to examine the science behind global warming, and then to act accordingly. It is not, he argues, a matter where businesses have "anything sensible to contibute".

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Multimedia

• Podcast: listen to the interview with Lord Lawson

• Transcript: read the interview in full

He acknowledges that businesses may see opportunities to profit from environment-related government subsidies, "and if the Government is so foolish as to give these subsidies then I'm not going to complain about businesses taking advantage of that."

But he adds that such subsidies may be reined in as the pressures of the global economic downturn continue to be felt. (Lord Lawson was speaking to Times Online earlier this summer, before the recent, renewed economic turbulence in Europe and the United States.)

China and India, Lord Lawson argues, are right to avoid targets to reduce carbon emissions which would force them to curb their development. But he predicts that in consequence it will not be possible to meet targets for the cutback in global carbon emissions (which he himself does not believe to be necessary) or even to significantly reduce emissions at all.

"What is likely to happen is more and more of those industries that use a lot of energy will decamp to China and India, or else they will decline in Europe and their opposite numbers in China and India, because they've got much cheaper energy, will get a bigger and bigger share of the market. So that in fact the emissions will still be coming but they'll be coming from China and India instead of coming from Europe."

He also argues that there are "plusses as well as minuses" associated with a warming planet, citing findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Last year, he says, the IPCC "suggested that the sort of mean, most likely, increase in temperature over the next hundred years is an increase of about three degrees centigrade. And they say that an increase of about three degrees centigrade would actually be beneficial to world food output."