E3G

War passes: the climate is for ever

By Tom Burke

We humans do not learn easily. We try and fail and try again. Our progress is incremental. We are prone to repeating our mistakes. Too often, we are content to let the future redeem the mistakes of the present.

No leader will want to come away from Copenhagen saying they failed to solve a problem they have recognised as the most serious facing humanity. But the appearance of success will be easier to achieve than the substance. It will consist of words and the less the success the more interpretable the words.

To get emissions on a downward path by 2015, two hundred nations must agree to so coordinate their energy policies as to build a carbon neutral global energy system by 2050. This will require the greatest cooperative endeavour in history. Agreement in Copenhagen is the key to the lock on the door to that forty year endeavour.  The political conditions needed to turn that key are not yet there. We have this year to build them.

Deeds rather than words will play the biggest part in building those political conditions. President-elect Obama has pointed the way by proposing a US stimulus package that will deliver economic, energy and climate security together. If the EU and China stimulus packages are similarly well designed then $1.5 trillion dollars will be spent in ways which really will begin the transition to a low carbon energy system.

Maintaining climate security in the 21st Century will require at least as big an effort as maintaining peace did in the 20th century.”

Most of the world has played a far smaller part than the OECD countries in creating the problem. Their reluctance to act is understandable, if unwise. Without significant financial help from the OECD countries to meet the cost of adapting to the climate change to which they have been committed by others and to help with building their own low carbon economies they will be unable to support the necessary agreement. We are talking tens of billions not millions.

Words will matter too. But the words that will count most are those of political leaders not official negotiators. Count the number of times a month Presidents and Foreign Ministers are in the media talking about climate change. Note the number of times they hold press conferences on the issue. If they are not going up month by month, we are failing.

Climate change is a bad problem that it getting worse. For the moment it remains manageable. Pretty soon it will become unmanageable. We already have both the technology and the capital to solve this problem. What is uncertain, and will be determined this year, is whether we have the political will to do so.

I grew up in a world engaged in another long term, large scale cooperative endeavour. It spent billions of dollars on building weapons it hoped never to use. When they became obsolete it threw them away and built even more sophisticated and expensive weapons which it hoped never to use.

We did that for fifty years. Eventually the world really did become a safer place. The threat of climate change to the prosperity, security and well-being of everyone on the planet, especially anyone under forty, is far more certain than was the threat of the Cold War going hot. Maintaining climate security in the 21st Century will require at least as big an effort as maintaining peace did in the 20th century.