It should be the main coalition for mobilising the voices of the public – it should mobilise grannies, families, young people, and people many who have never demonstrated before into saying that we want urgent and ambitious action. That is what MPH did, it is what the Stop the War coalition did, it is what the Democracy for Scotland alliance did. Each of these were principle based, non-exclusive and made a big noise. They opened a space for many voices to be heard – all building to one bug voice for action.

The more detailed the policy, the more you alienate much of the public. I am not saying the policy as stated is perfect, but he in-fighting between NGOs to have their specific issue included or arguing over small detail are counter productive for such alliances.

As stated already, behind the TckTckTck campaign are a number of NGOs who are working together to put the policy detail to the people who need to hear it. In the UK the BOND Development and Environment group does a fantastic job of co-ordinating NGO voices to government. There is a great deal of coherence in the UK NGO messaging (largely in line with CAN messaging) to government, but also space for individual NGOs to get their points across. The NGOs are developing policy red lines against which the Copenhagen outcome will be judged.

TckTckTck should be the rallying cry, opening space for many voices. Not the dictator of policy.

The Green movement has failed so far to bring the public out together in force on climate change – I am not yet sure if TckTckTck will either but I hope to goodness that it does.

I’m not saying that *individual* NGOs don’t have credible policy positions on climate and energy. As you say, WWF’s legal text is a case in point: it’s extremely specific, a superb piece of work, and if it were only TckTckTck’s position too, then I woulnd’t be writing tetchy blog posts like this one. Similarly, among the development NGOs Tearfund’s pioneering work on climate comes immediately to mind (as I’ve said here before – http://www.globaldashboard.org/2009/03/26/come-on-ngos-raise-your-game/); Oxfam has been way ahead of the game on biofuels, to take another example.

My critique is instead about the collective positions that underpin coalitions. TckTckTck is falling into the same old trap that Stop Climate Chaos fell into before it – the NGOs involved can’t agree their position, so they go for verbiage instead, and forfeit their policy edge in the process. And whatever you say, no-one thought SCC was relevant on international climate policy; how could they, when no-one (least of all SCC itself) could articulate what it wanted?

So take for example the question of a stabilisation target (which is what I meant by an overarching objective). You refer to the methodological difficulties in translating 350 ppm to a medium term emissions target. But what you don’t say is that after lengthy dust-ups on this, TckTckTck members were actually unable to agree on one – because 350.org and various others wouldn’t back down on 350ppm, whereas another faction felt that only 450ppm would be seen as credible by policymakers.

And if the main global NGO coalition on climate can’t even agree on the level at which we should be aiming to stabilise the climate, then it’s hard to see how they can claim to be holding policymakers to account on same.

A

I think some of this is fair, some of it not. There’s no excuse for tck tck tck not mentioning the baseline year. And I am surprised they do not articulate a headline figure for public climate finance. Climate Action Network, which coordinates climate advocacy across NGOs, has certainly managed to achieve sufficient consensus among its members to do so.

Whilst getting your asks right should be easy, specifying a single over-arching objective is difficult. MPH didn’t have one – unless you consider Make Poverty History sufficiently specific – which, judging from your post above, I’m guessing you do not. To focus, as you suggest, on a mitigation objective would exclude adaptation, just as to focus only on debt would have excluded aid and trade from MPH. And 350ppm, whilst certainly appealing, runs into trouble further down the line: whilst most NGOs would support such an objective in principle, the fact that there has been no emissions pathway calculated for this stabilisation level makes it impossible to articulate consistent, robust asks for mid-term emissions targets – which of course is where the negotiations are at.

And to be fair to them, the NGOs behind tck tck tck have extremely detailed policy positions of which policymakers are well aware. If you want to see how nose-bleedingly detailed, check out Treaty 1.0 at http://www.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/?uNewsID=166281. It includes a draft legal text with NGO asks on all aspects of the negotiations and represents a more comprehensive policy position than those of many parties to the convention. There has certainly been a tremendous amount of lobby into negotiators and policymakers on the back of this document and others like it.

As you may have guessed by now, I work on climate at an NGO. And myself and my colleagues have regular meetings with negotiators, policymakers, special advisers and ministers across whitehall, and not just to hand over petitions. Over the course of these meetings, whilst I have certainly at times felt that I am an irritant, I’ve never felt that I’m considered an irrelevance!