E3G

The Geopolitics of Climate Change

By John Ashton and Tom Burke

The May 2004 Edition of SWP Comments - the English version of the magazine of Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (The German Institute for International and Security Affairs) - includes an online version of the paper on the Geopolitics of Climate Change written by John Ashton and Tom Burke.

This article is an abridged version of a presentation given by the authors at an INTACT/SWP roundtable on climate change and foreign policy on 4 February 2004. A pdf version of the document is attached.

The Geopolitics of Climate Change

Climate change is one of the most urgent, and difficult issues facing civilisation. Recently, the chief scientist to the British Government said that it was a bigger threat than global terrorism. Not all would agree with him but it does share with global terrorism the property of being a new, different and dangerous phenomenon.

All experts want to claim that their problem is different. There are three reasons for believing that in this case climate policy analysts might be right.

First, the sheer scale of the problem. It is a truly global problem that directly affects every single citizen of every single nation.  This creates an entanglement of interests unprecedented in history.  No opt-outs are available.

If the problem of climate change is truly global, so, too is the path to its solution. At its heart, solving this problem requires nothing less than aligning the energy policies of over 150 nations.

The European Union, despite all the urgent pressures of creating a single market, has tried without great success for 50 years to align the energy policies of just 15 countries. We have seen repeated attempts by governments of the United States to create a Federal energy policy diminished by internal difficulties.

Tackling climate change is a comparable diplomatic challenge to the strategic arms control talks or the creation of the World Trade Organisation. Both of these processes took more than fifty years to arrive at their present incomplete positions. We may not have the luxury of fifty years to address climate change.