E3G

The Future of Climate Policy

By Tom Burke

Tom Burke was recently invited to address The Tomorrow Project at an event held at the Royal Society. His speech is below and available to download too, calling on political will to ‘protect the future of civilisation’.

The Future of Climate Policy

An idea that has been haunting me since the beginning of the year is that this is the most important year in human history. Ideas do not seek permission before they enter your mind and they are not always the most welcome of guests. This was very definitely an unwelcome idea.

It was prompted by the articles run in several newspapers anticipating the events of the year to come. Bravely, they passed judgement on the likelihood of everything from an early election (no) to the bombing of Iran; from the price of oil (higher) to the fall of Mugabe. They were full of prognostications – mostly very gloomy – about the state of the economy.

We know that, terrible though consequences of war and recession are, they pass. Climate change is for ever.

But it was what they did not say that really caught my attention. None of them seemed to have noticed that in December of this year a meeting far more important than war or recession to the future prosperity and security of all seven billion of us will take place in Copenhagen.

We know that, terrible though consequences of war and recession are, they pass. Climate change is for ever.

At around that time Brian Eno wrote a piece in the Guardian about the difference between a world in which people feel could be a ‘better place’ and one they feel to be a ‘nightmare of desperation, fear and suspicion’. In the latter world ‘freeloaders and brigands and pirates and cheats will take control.’ Do not overlook, in all talk of rising sea-levels, melting ice-caps and the droughts, floods, fires and diseases that will be the markers of a rapidly changing climate, the fact that riding along with them will be the freeloaders, brigands, pirates and cheats.

Brian Eno was writing, as both Martin Wolf and Timothy Garton Ash have also done, about the impact on politics of shifting from a world of abundance to one of scarcity. There is nothing in our knowledge of a world without a stable climate to lead us to believe a changing climate will shift it back.

We know that dangerous climate change is a threat to the fragile film of order we humans have built around the chaos of events and call ‘civilisation’.

The punctuation of history is denoted by the names of the places where order was restored after chaos had prevailed – Westphalia, Versailles, San Francisco. It is not an exaggeration to say that the implications of what happens – or does not – in Copenhagen in December will do more to shape human destiny for longer than any of them.

The reason for this is the unique nature the climate as a human problem. We know that dangerous climate change is a threat to the fragile film of order we humans have built around the chaos of events and call ‘civilisation’.

We know, because Europe’s political leaders have said so, that a rise in global average temperature of more than two degrees Celsius is dangerous. It would turn a problem that is serious but manageable into one that is unmanageable and catastrophic.

We know from our scientists that greenhouse gas emissions must be moving downwards globally by 2015 if we are to have at best an evens chance of staying below two degrees. It would be rash to put your house on an evens bet, it is something a lot more reckless to be betting civilisation on those odds.