E3G

The Future of Climate Policy

By Tom Burke

The nature of the climate is such that the future cannot redeem today’s mistakes. Once a given concentration of carbon is in the atmosphere, the climate it drives is inexorable even if it takes decades or more to fully express itself. In the most literal sense, the sins of the fathers will indeed be visited on the sons and well beyond the third and fourth generation.

We humans do not learn easily. We try and fail and try again. Our progress is incremental and we are prone to repeating our mistakes. We are too often content to let the future redeem the mistakes of the present. Climate change does not suit us. We have little experience with the irrevocable, and dislike exacting time limits.

Compared to the diplomatic effort needed to achieve success in Copenhagen that required for a final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian problem or to deter Iran from seeking nuclear weapons is relatively small. But there is little sign that an effort of the required level of ambition is yet being made. Compare the amount of media coverage, and intensity of political effort, given to the Middle East to that accorded to climate change.

History does not have an agenda on which items can be prioritised. Either you deal with the events it throws at you or they deal with you.

This is not to diminish in any way the magnitude of those problems nor to argue that less should be done to address them. It is rather to point out the classic human error of allowing the more immediate to obscure the more urgent. History does not have an agenda on which items can be prioritised. Either you deal with the events it throws at you or they deal with you. As Carlyle once remarked “if something be not done, something will do itself and in a way that pleases no-one”*.

No leader will want to come away from Copenhagen saying they failed to solve the most serious problem 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.

The Copenhagen negotiations are among the most complex ever undertaken. The goal is to achieve a so-called ‘global deal’ in which the industrialised world agrees to a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol and agrees to provide finance for adaptation and the transfer of low carbon technologies in return for rest of the world undertaking ‘monitorable, reportable and verifiable’ commitments to reduce their emissions.

In reality there are two main, and a number of related negotiations, including those on forestry, going on separately under the same umbrella without, as yet, a clear mechanism for bringing them all together. The issue of the legal form of whatever will be agreed in Copenhagen is one of the least discussed but potentially most difficult of the matters to be resolved.

National leaders are currently distracted by the need to engineer an economic recovery. They are increasingly unwilling to impose constraints on economic growth. Furthermore, public finances are already over-stretched by the loss of tax revenues and urgent need to finance economic stimulus packages.

This considerably narrows the scope for agreement on the necessary funding for adaptation and technology transfer. Proposals for financing such capital flows rely heavily on a carbon price or permit auction revenues which are themselves dependent on the agreement by the industrialised countries to a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol.