There are times when you just have to despair at the degree of selfishness that people (even/especially important people who have to make big decisions) can display at times. I wrote the other day about the Polish objection to tougher CO2 emissions reduction targets, but now today the European Parliament decided that lunch was more important than voting on a report on raising emissions reductions targets.

Lets get this straight: some MEPs thought that it was more important to go for lunch, than to do their job, finish voting from this Part Session, and make progress on an important report on a hugely important topic. I don’t know what was in the canteen today, but judging from the usual fare they offer up, I struggle to see how those hungry MEPs were unable to resist it.

Poland really knows how to set expectations! I didn’t have much hope that environmental issues and countering climate change would be high on the agenda during the Polish presidency of the Council of Ministers, but with Poland standing alone against an attempt to tighten CO2 emissions reduction targets, I guess any hope that the EU will try to up its game for the COP17 climate talks in Durban this December are pretty much scuppered.

The public rationale behind the Polish position seems to be that the country is so reliant on coal fired power stations, that a target for 50% cuts in emissions would be too strenuous for the country. Now I’m sorry, but does a whole continent really have to be held back by poor energy planning in one country?! Surely a better approach would be to work out a way for Poland to transition to renewables, and lower-carbon energy, while letting the rest of us get on with trying something (even if it isn’t much) to tackle the problem?

And so, another year has passed. I can’t really say that 2010 was “an honest, argumentative, real, and better year”. Indeed, in the British politics-sphere, much of the political debate which occurred amounted to little more than contrasting statements of “I’m right, and you’re stupid because you disagree with me”. Nevertheless, the introduction of the first Green MP to the House of Commons was one big step towards my hope. The response to the total failure of the Copenhagen climate talks was also encouraging, and the relative successes achieved at Cancún are testament to the gradual realisation that we have to grow up, and think of how we’ll cope in the future.

I’m sometimes drawn to ask whether political leaders are capable of coping with more than one thing at once. Extreme poverty, conflict, environmental crisis, the end of cheap energy; these are all floating around us, demanding solutions. Yet the biggest political efforts, and the largest investments, are made in the propping up of a financial system which is proven to be catastrophically flawed. I’m not naive, the financial system is an integral part of our way of life, and its reformation into the totally green ideal that is envisaged in the various iterations of the Green New Deal will take time; short term action to keep the whole lot going was largely justified and required, but the air of crisis which is hanging around it all is leading political leaders to think that their excessive and overblown measures to ‘stop the ship from sinking’ are just that. Such delusions keep political energies and capital from the other problems where such things are badly needed.

2011 is the year when action is needed. Action on climate change, with a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol as an essential outcome of the talks in South Africa in December; action on making the economic system we are saddled with into a green and sustainable one, which will work for people well into the coming decades; action on generating sustainable energy to replace the old fashioned fossil fuels we rely on now; and action on cutting the gap between the richest and poorest, and removing the barriers to development for the poorest countries.

So, when my 2012 New Year’s post arrives, lets hope the vast chasms in development and quality of life, reported last year on this blog, will have narrowed to some degree, and that what honest debate 2010 gave rise to has translated into strong and worthwhile action.

Happy New Year, may 2011 be good to you.

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!

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

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.

I had a lecture today from the former foreign minister of the Netherlands, Bernard Bot. He’s a Christian democrat, so obviously to the centre-right of politics, and far from an insignificant figure. He was talking on the topic of the widening and deepening of Europe, but touched on energy policy, especially regarding our relations with our eastern neighbours. He seemed genuinely convinced that it won’t be possible to expand renewable generating capacity to a significant level; in short, he seemed to advocate the continued development of oil, gas, and nuclear generating capacity.

Being someone who is immersed in politics, I naturally have good friends in most parties across the political spectrum, and when it comes to matters such as this, they all seem—much as I am—firm in their convictions on renewables and energy policy, with the general consensus being that it isn’t enough and we need to develop nuclear and strengthen links to oil and gas producing regions (ie. Russia). Of course, greens can come up with a dozen arguments as to why this is the wrong approach, but seeing as we like to believe our views are firmly rooted in fact and the rigours of science, what possesses those of other political colours to hold firm to the views they advocate? More importantly, what does this mean for the chances of being able to tackle energy supply and demand issues, and of course, climate change? Unfortunately this question was a little too off topic for me to ask in the Q&A session at the end of his lecture, but it’d be interesting to hear if anyone has any thoughts on the matter.