This isn’t the most immediate reaction to Copenhagen, but it was mostly written in direct reaction to the news coming out of the conclusion of the conference; it’s just taken a little while for me to have the time to post.

All throughout the Copenhagen Conference, I was trying to remind myself that a week or two before the whole thing started I answered a question in my economics class on whether anything seriously significant and actually useful would come from the Conference with a resolute “not a chance”. I was trying to remind myself of this to keep from getting my hopes up: Obamaesque rhetoric and the occasional positive news story from the Danish capital are too easy to grasp on when you think the need for a strong and binding agreement is as important as I think it is.

I’m glad I did this, because my conclusion after the leak of the ‘Danish text’ (though I can hardly claim the credit for this conclusion, I almost certainly copied it off some commentator in a newspaper or blog) that we’d mess around this time and procrastinate the decision to a comfortingly distant point—and one which naturally had nothing to do with four or five year electoral cycles—, seems to be fairly accurate. When I wrote the bulk of this post, I hadn’t had much time to digest the news from the COP15 (I was having an adventure by choosing the very best day to take the train from the Netherlands to Edinburgh), but I did see the following which I quote from the BBC News web-site,

“However, he added that the deal was not enough to prevent dangerous climate change in the future – but nonetheless was an important first move.”

Bali was the “important first move”; the EU’s Energy and Climate Package was preparatory legislation; Barcelona was the end stages of negotiation! Right now, all I can see is that when we finally get ‘round to having another set of negotiations for proper and legally-binding action to tackle climate change, we’ll come out of it saying that we have laid the groundwork for co-operation and further discussion.

If we talk because that is what is easy, then we are cowards.

I’m being cynical about human nature, but are we seriously going to wait until things get really bad before we even start to do anything to fix what is one of, if not the, biggest problem facing humanity right now? It’s almost enough to make me want to turn to revolutionary socialism just so that I have a political black hole to throw all my energy into; and anyone who knows me, knows that if something is driving me to the socialists, it must be getting to me a fair bit!

I’m annoyed that the COP15 was scheduled for now. Not for any great political reason, but because I have end of semester exams this week, so I can’t really write about the Conference—or do much apart from write about Anglo-European relations in 1950 or attempt to comprehend standard deviation and t-tests—until Friday, when I hope to get plenty of catch-up blogging done. Check back then though, I’m sure the end of the Conference will spark some reaction from my likely weary mind.

You know that you’re close to hurting powerful and not completely innocent interests when something that should otherwise be honest, scientific, and above board, takes on an air of sleaze. I am of course referring to the leaked emails I covered on this blog the other day, and the leaked draft ‘agreement’ from the Copenhagen Conference, aka the “Danish text”.

I had a read of the text (linked to below), and while I’m not certain where The Guardian got some of its claims from—clearly my abilities in reading international legal texts are not up to scratch, an especially fun thing to learn when I have a moot European Court of Justice on Friday—, the document is very far from what I would have hoped for from the Conference.

Dealing with just a couple of specific points: first, the document repeatedly uses the phrase, “poorest and most vulnerable countries”; what does this mean? It seems like either a recognition that those who will be hit hardest by climate change will be in the “poorest and most vulnerable countries”, and so deserve urgent and special assistance in their efforts at adaptation and mitigation; or alternatively, and rather more cynically, it could be a way for developed nations—foreseeing the inevitability of their assisting developing states—to keep the number of countries to which assistance must be afforded, to the bare minimum. Say I’m cynical about this if you want; I’ll explain why in my next post, though you can probably already guess.

The second thing I wanted to specifically pick out just now was the means by which this draft text came to light. The document wasn’t released into the open by its authors, it was leaked by someone. How can there be any form of trust between developed and developing nations at the Conference, if one side goes off to secretly write a draft text that it will try to force through with a smile from Obama and, no doubt, a generous helping of ‘diplomacy’ from all in “the circle of commitment” as The Guardian reports the authors are apparently called? As I recall the President of Brazil repeatedly stating in a report on climate change from sometime around 2004, and I paraphrase slightly here, “a tonne of carbon emitted in Bogota has the same impact as a tonne of carbon emitted in Chicago”. Yes, developed and developing countries will feel climate change in different ways, and both have different capacities for mitigation and adaptation; developed and developing countries have to meet as close to being equals as they can though: we’re all in this together.

I have a feeling I’ll be returning to the “Danish text” fairly soon.

Link to the Danish text

Since we have an external action service—basically a diplomatic corps—now, it would seem sensible to ask a particular question: where is Europe? Of course, geographically we’re stuck on the edge of Asia, next to the Middle East, and above Africa, but politically, where are we?

It’s been a funny couple of decades. The first years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the radical unbalancing of the world’s balance of power were a bit like that feeling you get when the lights are suddenly switched on after watching a film in the dark; a brief moment of bewilderment, scaled to international politics and spread over a decade. And then in 2001, we realised where we were and what was happening. People said 9/11 changed everything, it didn’t, but it did let us know that everything was changing.

The old and comfortable wisdom that international politics consisted solely of states and a few of their instruments such as the UN or the EU, with multi-national companies lurking somewhere nearby, vanished; along with it went the notion of a world with two carefully balanced superpowers. Ours is now the age of the ‘non-state actor’ and the stage these particular actors tread on is a multi-polar world.

More concerning for Europe is not the actors or the stage, but the play being performed. The challenges which determine this script are rather large: climate change, energy security, economic crisis, and development of the poorest states.

We used to be able to say that the West would use its globally dominant position to ensure that any moves to deal with these problems would be to our favour in some way. Multi-polarity has done away with this. If we take a poor and corrupt developing state with lashings of oil and other valuable natural resources, and put it in the global marketplace that it funds itself in every day, who is it going to sell its stuff to: a country demanding assurances on human rights and other popular liberal concerns, or a country which will pay the same or more and not ask any awkward questions about the sanctity of ballot boxes at the last election, or the destination of the money being paid? The very same goes for development aid and assistance.

I’m not a pessimist on this; the influence of the EU and the US won’t decline too much, but it will be joined by a competing model of international policy. There is something to like in this competing model: it uses trade in a way which has the capacity to make a lasting difference. Of course the mode of its application by the likes of China is abhorrent to liberal democracies—or at least, it should be. I suppose we have to look on the bright side of things and make the best of the new order of the world. Adapting our overseas aid (by which I mean Europe’s aid in totality) and investment policy to offer more incentives to developing states to swallow the poll of reforms to reduce corruption and further human rights. Focussing on our close neighbours and making sure that we ‘do’ development properly will go a long way to securing a safe position for Europe in the diverse world we now live in.

This post is already a tad too long, so I’ll leave the energy security and climate change problems to some future posts in this theme.

If the hacking of the University of East Anglia’s email system proves anything, it’s that public opinion, or at least the media’s opinion, is not ‘there’ yet, in terms of recognition of the reality and scientific basis of climate change.

I’m reminded of a quote from The West Wing, “you can’t sell science”. The allegations made against the scientists who sent the hacked emails seem to be quite inflated; the data gathered has been confirmed independently, several times, and at other institutions. This doesn’t placate angry climate sceptics though. Their stance is understandable, as are the reasons for public sympathy with their views: people don’t like change, especially if that change involves short-term pain, or the perception of it.

In my last post I suggested that the Copenhagen conference is a step towards a truly serious approach to tackling climate change, with more progress needed; I think the same goes for public opinion: the situation is getting better. The BBC published a poll today showing that public consideration of climate change as being “very serious” has risen from 44% in 1998, to an average of 64% now. The question is how long it will take for this to really filter through to political and business leaders?

I had mixed feelings when I watched the opening of the Copenhagen conference—dramatically broadcast in a ‘we interrupt normal programming’ format on BBC World News, cutting off a Turkish diplomat mid-sentence on HARDtalk. With a lack of any desire for a legally binding treaty to replace Kyoto in 2012, it is tempting to write off Copenhagen as a load of hot-air, but I think it still might serve some purpose. If an agreement on the rôle of developed and developing states in tackling climate change can be reached, then at the very least, we will be on the right road, and ready to take more urgent action once a few countries cease to exist, and the harsher effects begin to be felt.

It’s something, albeit not much, that we are where we are now; we are, after all, trying to change a fundamental aspect of modern global society, and people rarely like change.