E3G

The Future of Climate Policy

By Tom Burke

Much will depend on how well the political leadership of the major countries understand the complexities of the problem and how effective they are at cutting through them to reach agreement on the essentials: preservation of the Kyoto mechanisms so that there continues to be a carbon price; sufficient additional funding for adaptation and technology transition in the developing world and successfully aligning timetables so that the US can again become a full participant in the global regime.

This would not solve the problem, but it would keep open the door to its solution.

The world is oversupplied with words and images and very short of deeds. The gap between rhetoric and action on climate change in even the most serious of nations is so wide as to justify much scepticism. Without clear signs of that gap closing, the political conditions for an ambitious enough policy agreement in Copenhagen and later will remain elusive.

There is an even larger gap coming ever more clearly into view. This is the gap between what climate science says we need to do and what climate politics says is within the realm of the possible. This is encouraging a realist school of climate policy thinkers to emerge.

In this view, we should not be trying to achieve ‘unrealistic’ goals. Better, this counsel of despair advises, to go for something achievable and build on that than to shoot for something too ambitious and fail. In other circumstance, with other problems, this might, indeed, be wise counsel. But for the reasons I gave before, with the particular nature of this problem makes such realist thought indistinguishable from defeatism.

We do not have any policy problems with climate change. What we are actually short of is the political will to deploy those policy instruments and the knowledge of how best to go about building that political will.

I grew up in a world that spent billions of dollars on building weapons it hoped never to use. When they became obsolete we threw them away and built even more sophisticated and expensive weapons which we hoped never to use. We did that for fifty years. 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.

There is no engineering reason why we cannot make the transition to a carbon neutral energy system by 2050. Nor is there any fundamental economic obstacle as Nick Stern has demonstrated**. But knowing that solving the climate problem will not damage your economy is not the same as knowing how the cost of doing so should be shared between consumers, taxpayers and shareholders.

We do not have any policy problems with climate change. We have an extraordinary range of policy ideas to apply to the hugely diverse ways in which the problem will present itself to us. What we are actually short of is the political will to deploy those policy instruments and the knowledge of how best to go about building that political will.

Choosing who will win and who will lose is the province of politics. If politics is the art of the possible then the task of political leadership is that of expanding the realm of the possible. I am in no doubt that it is possible to solve this problem, but I wonder if we have the collective political leadership it will take to do so.

Address by Mr Tom Burke CBE to The Tomorrow Project, The Royal Society, London, June 18th 2009.

*Carlyle, T. (1840): ‘The Condition of England Question’
** Stern, N. (2006): ‘The Economics of Climate Change’, Cambridge University Press.