I was talking to a friend about the Copenhagen climate summit the other day.

She was aghast – and angry – that, even in a best case deal, the United States will take on an emissions target that is no more onerous than that given to the European Union (and may be considerably less so).

US emissions have shot up during the Kyoto years, with the average American now accounting for twice the emissions of his/her European counterpart. But EU negotiators are so desperate to have the US rejoin the party that they’ll swallow more or less any commitment that their US counterparts are prepared to put on the table.

My friend’s visceral reaction is evidence, I think, that outside the ‘climate bubble’, citizens in European countries have not even begun to ask themselves what a fair deal on climate looks like.

This creates a real chance of a backlash when they finally work out that the United States expects to be allowed to continue to emit more than Europe for the next thirty or forty years – and possibly for much longer.

That’s why John Kerry got all hot under the collar when I asked him at Bali whether all countries should be heading for similar levels of emissions per head, dismissing those who insisted on playing what he called ‘the per capita game’.

It’s also why American politicians obsess over the fact the China now emits more than the US, but fail to remind their audiences that there are more than four Chinese for every American.

Past form would suggest that European governments will be meek, mild and biddable in Copenhagen, doing everything they can to make Barack Obama’s life as easy as possible. But it would be a mistake for them to be too supine.

After all, no-one respects weakness, especially Americans. And European citizens will have no hesitation in knifing their governments, when they work out that they didn’t even try to get its transatlantic cousins to finally begin to pull their weight.

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, George Will has a bright idea in today’s column which will, sadly, be read in 350 or so US newspapers this morning: “America needs a national commission appointed to assess the evidence about climate change.”

Brilliant. Truly brilliant. Shame, really, that the world already has the IPCC whose job it is to “assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.”

Of course, Will knows this. In the run up to Copenhagen, he’s simply lobbying for anything that will delay robust steps to cut emissions (RealClimate has a round up of his woeful track record writing about the issue).

What he may not know, however, is that the IPCC itself owes its existence – at least, in part – to a much earlier American attempt to deflect policy action. Alex and I covered this in our paper, State of the Debate:

According to Shardul Agrawala’s fascinating account of the origins of the IPCC, its roots can be found in a workshop held in 1985 in Villach, organized by two United Nations agencies and the non-governmental International Council for Science (ICSU).

At the Villach workshop, a group of scientists, acting in a personal capacity, announced a consensus that “in the first half of the next century a rise of global mean temperature would occur which is greater than any in man’s history.”

The need to deepen, extend and institutionalise this consensus was pushed in particular by the United States government – in part because it wanted to ‘buy time’ and delay a potentially costly policy response. The US wanted an inter-governmental mechanism and that’s what it got.

According to Agrawala, this formal insertion of scientific expertise was of great importance. The result was to pump sufficient shared awareness of the climate problem into the international arena, providing a platform for governments to enter into a serious negotiation.

The IPCC’s dominant position in the debate also became self-reinforcing. “The more credible experts there were already in the IPCC, the more attractive it was for other established experts to join, [and] the more internal strength the institutions had to defend its scientific integrity against political pressures.” An anchor for global understanding of the issue, and perceptions of its seriousness, had been provided.

But, hey, let’s have another review of the evidence! If it takes another thirty years, I am sure that will suit Will just fine…

Today, Ban-Ki Moon, worried by fading prospects for a climate deal at Copenhagen, will try and knock heads (of state) together at his Summit on Climate Change. Here’s the list of speakers:

H.E. Mr. Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations
Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chair, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
H.E. Mr. Barack Obama, President of the United States of America
H.E. Mr. Mohamed Nasheed, President of the Republic of Maldives
H.E. Mr. Hu Jintao, President of the Peoples Republic of China
H.E. Mr. Yukio Hatoyama, Prime Minister of Japan
H.E. Mr. Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda
H.E. Mr. Fredrik Reinfeldt, Prime Minister of Sweden
H.E. Mr. Óscar Arias Sánchez, President of Costa Rica
H.E. Mr. Nicolas Sarkozy, President of France
Professor Wangari Muta Maathai, Founder, Green Belt Movement, Kenya (Civil Society)
Ms. Yugratna Srivastava, Asia-Pacific UNEP/TUNZA Junior-Board representative, India, age 13 (Youth)
H.E. Mr. Tillman Joseph Thomas, Prime Minister of Grenada
H.E. Mr. Ahmad Babiker Nahar , Minister of Environment and Urban Development of Sudan
H.E. Mr. Lars Løkke Rasmussen, Prime Minister of Denmark

It’s a pretty standard list – major powers (check), regional balance (check), soon-to-be-submerged-island-state (check), boffin (check), civil society (check), token youth (check). But then you hit the European problem. The Swedes hold the Presidency and thus speak for the EU. Rasmussen is there because he’s going to shoulder a lot of the blame if Copenhagen fails to deliver. But how on earth has Nicolas Sarkozy managed to clamber onto the platform?

It beggars belief that, just when Europeans most need to speak with a single voice, the French president is – once again – giving his ego free rein. Or have I missed something?

Later on today, delegates at the Values Voter Summit will gather for a breakout session with Dr Calvin Beisner from the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.

The title? Global Warming Hysteria: The New Face of the Pro-Death Agenda.

The summit, praised by the Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder for presenting the ‘mild-mannered’ face of mainstream American conservatism (gulp), will hear that a belief in manmade climate change rests on “an unbiblical view of God, mankind, and the environment.”

Climate change policies, they will be told, will cause hundreds of millions of deaths. And this loss of life will not be accidental. Environmentalism is rooted in “hostility to humanity”. Fear of global warming is being deliberately stoked to prepare the way for a new Holocaust that will drastically reduce global population.

“If people are the problem,“ the event’s publicity asks, “what’s the final solution?“ (more…)

Thought the populist right wing opposition to healthcare reform was bad? Just wait til you see what’s in store on climate change…

A leaked memo sent by an oil industry group reveals a plan to create astroturf rallies at which industry employees posing as “citizens” will urge Congress to oppose climate change legislation. The memo — sent by the American Petroleum Institute and obtained by Greenpeace, which sent it to reporters — urges oil companies to recruit their employees for events that will “put a human face on the impacts of unsound energy policy,” and will urge senators to “avoid the mistakes embodied in the House climate bill.”

API [says] that the campaign is being funded by a coalition of corporate and conservative groups that includes the anti-health-care-reform group 60 Plus, FreedomWorks, and Grover Norquist’s Americans For Tax Reform.

That’s from TPM, who also have a copy of the full text of the API memo. Be in no doubt as to the potential impact of this kind of lobbying: news is just breaking in the US that the White House is “ready to abandon the idea of giving Americans the option of government-run insurance as part of a new health care system”.

The “grassroots” opposition to healthcare reform in the US is a fascinating case study which climate nerds should study obsessively – noting not only that (a) battles of this kind are not won with facts, but also that (b) it’s not simply a case of corporate astroturf lobbying.

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The FT has a big splash this morning on how concerns about future climate policy and the global downturn are both driving a move away from global supply chains and towards more regional ones.

Companies are increasingly looking closer to home for their components, meaning that for their US or European operations they are more likely to use Mexico and eastern Europe than China, as previously. “A future where energy is more expensive and less plentifully available will lead to more regional supply chains,” Gerard Kleisterlee, chief executive of Philips, one of Europe’s biggest companies, told the Financial Times.

Mr Kleisterlee said businesses needed to find ways to build an economy on a sustainable basis ahead of the Copenhagen summit on climate change later this year, with “a review of global logistics and transport” one of the important steps. He said that until now cheap transport costs had meant “Mexico wasn’t competitive with China for supplying the US”. But he now forecasts that companies such as Philips will use countries such as Ukraine for supplying Europe rather than Asia.

Nor are climate regulation and the downturn the only drivers towards a more regional world – there’s also the prospect of a return to very expensive oil in the near future. If you’re wondering what that means for global supply chains, look no further than what started to happen during 2007:

…competitiveness in steel had already shifted away from Chinese exports and back to North American producers. Soaring transport costs – first on importing iron ore to China from Australia or from halfway around the world in Brazil, and then on exporting finished steel overseas to North America – added as much as an additional $90 onto the cost of what was then $600 per ton of hot rolled steel. That more than offset the Chinese wage advantage on what, thanks to technological change, had become as little as an hour and a half of labor time for that ton of steel.

For the first time in over a decade, made-in-America steel had become cheaper than Chinese imports in the US marketplace. Long before the recession blew up the US steel market, Chinese exports to the US fell 20% between July 2007 and March 2008 – and US steel production was up 10% over the same period. All of a sudden American steel producers were winning back their home market. Who would have thought that tripil digit oil prices could breathe new life into America’s rust belt?

That’s Jeff Rubin, in his very highly recommended new book on what peak oil will mean for globalisation (regular readers will remember his CIBC World Markets research paper on Could Soaring Transport Costs Reverse Globalisation a little over a year ago) – go buy it.

If I were the Chinese government, I’d be worried. First you see your export sector getting hammered by triple digit oil prices.  Then even when they crash to less than half of their pre-spike levels (though n.b. still way above their pre-2000 average of 10 or 20 dollars a barrel, even in the biggest recession since 1929), you find that the downturn’s still driving a shift towards regionalisation in trade.

Time to start investing heavily in a more endogenous growth model, perhaps…

- In the week leading up to the first anniversary of the Russia-Georgia conflict, the FT reports on the lingering regional tensions still apparent, while openDemocracy assesses some of the war’s wider implications for the US, EU, China and Turkey. Georgia aside, James F. Collins, former US ambassador to Russia, highlights the current fragility of US-Russia relations and the importance of “sustained dialogue within a solid institutional framework” if measured progress is to continue.

- Elsewhere, in a taster of the forthcoming Quadrennial Defence Review (QDR), two senior Pentagon officials survey the global landscape and assess what this means for the US’s strategic outlook. The main challenge (alongside adapting to the realities of hybrid warfare and a growing number of failing states), Michele Flournoy and Shawn Brimley suggest, will likely revolve around competition for the global commons (sea, space, air and cyberspace). A successful approach, they argue, should see the US refocus its efforts on building strong global governance structures and taking the “lead in the creation of international norms”. Andrew Bast at WPR comments that this could once again herald a US foreign policy with Wilsonianism firmly at its core.

- Der Spiegel, meanwhile, takes an in-depth look at the growing global market for farmland. In what it labels the “new colonialism”, the article notes the implications of such investment flows for states in Africa and Asia, as well as gauging the impact on local farmers.

- Climatico assesses Nicolas Sarkozy’s climate change credentials, highlighting his “erratic behaviour” on the issue and suggesting that the French stance is one to watch in the run up to Copenhagen.

- Finally, an interesting PoliticsHome poll on attitudes of the British public to the country’s foreign policy. 65% of voters, it indicates, agree that foreign policy has weakened Britain’s “moral authority” abroad – a view held across the political spectrum. Perhaps more strikingly, however, a majority (54%) felt the country should scale down its overseas military commitments, even if this meant ceding global influence. Interestingly, 57% were in favour of humanitarian intervention. Writing in Newsweek, meanwhile, Stryker McGuire adds to the narrative of declinism. The current economic crisis, he argues, has finally put paid to Britain’s attempts to maintain its world role and place at the international top table.

US climate envoy, Todd Stern has tried to clarify exactly what the Obama administration wants from China on climate at Copenhagen (see post from Leo and me on the confusing signals the US has been sending out).

So here it is:

• “Very considerable” reductions on China’s business as usual emissions.
• These reductions to be binding, transparently measured and verifiable.
• No absolute emissions reductions but (preferably at least) a designated year when China’s emissions should peak.
• China’s commitment to be consistent with the world stabilising its emissions at around 450 ppm (“we don’t know whether it’s 445 or 460 or… but in that general range”).
• The package to be backed up by carbon offsets from the US to China – but these offsets should have “real environmental integrity” – and technology cooperation.

Obvious questions to ask Stern -

1. Do you believe that President Obama’s domestic commitments on climate are consistent with a 450ppm stabilization target?
2. Will the United States be pushing for a 450ppm target to be enshrined in the Copenhagen agreement?
3. When does the United States think Chinese emissions should peak to meet 450ppm?
4. When does the United States expect global emissions to peak?

The Guardian headline was unequivocal: “The US will exempt China from binding greenhouse gas targets.”

Guardian environment correspondent, David Adam, had had a chat with Jonathan Pershing, who leads the American climate delegation, and Pershing had told him that only developed countries need take on binding targets to reduce emissions. ”We’re saying that the actions of developing countries should be binding, not the outcomes of those actions.”

Now, that’s a big deal. After all, back in 1997, the US Senate made it crystal clear that it had no intention of ratifying Kyoto unless the agreement included “new specific scheduled commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions” for all developing countries, and China, Mexico, India, Brazil, and South Korea in particular.

Now, you can argue the toss about the merits of the US position (my personal view is that China should bind itself at Copenhagen to an agreed date by which its emissions will peak), but for Obama’s team to say at this stage – do a bit more on energy efficiency and renewables, and we’ll give you a free pass on targets – would be astounding.

Turns out Der Spiegel has a more detailed and much clearer interview with Pershing.

SPIEGEL: But the Chinese don’t want to accept legally binding reduction targets for CO2. Does the US still insist on such a commitment?

Pershing: Yes, definitely. We are still asking them to commit to legally binding CO2 reductions as part of a Copenhagen agreement.

SPIEGEL: With only five months left until the Copenhagen summit, do you think such a compromise will be possible?

Pershing: We are working very hard to achieve a good solution. The US remains focused on a legally binding agreement and on concluding that agreement in Copenhagen. We expect all developed nations to commit to comparable reduction targets and we want more countries to belong to the group of industrialized countries than today, for example Korea. Major economies with large total emissions like China should take additional steps, including a quantitative and quantifiable set of actions with a legal requirement to implement those actions.

So what gives? A fine line between ‘reductions’ and ‘targets’? Pershing going off script? Or sloppy reporting from the Guardian’s journalist?

(Via @tancopsey on Twitter – follow me @davidsteven.)

Update – And we have our answer – sloppy Guardian reporting. Its original story went up online at 14.53 BST, but was extensively revised and corrected at 18:31 (the old version simply disappeared, but there’s a copy below).

The new headline: “US says it will not demand binding carbon cuts from China.” So targets are still on the table; immediate absolute reductions are not (and they never were – the idea is utterly implausible).

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A while back, David did a post extolling the virtues of biochar as a potentially important – but widely overlooked – element of the response to climate change. Well, here’s another: black carbon.

As Durwood Zaelke of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development notes, black carbon is “the dark soot that comes from old diesel vehicles and burning biomass for cooking”. It accelerates global warming in two crucial ways: first, by absorbing more heat while particles of it float around in the atmosphere, and second by darkening snow and ice surfaces after it falls to the ground, thereby absorbing still more heat.

It’s a big deal.  One recent study cited by Zaelke suggests it’s responsible for 50% of Arctic warming; another that it reduces springtime Eurasian snow cover by as much as CO2 does.  Black carbon’s also a major part of the recent why the MIT study published 2 days ago is so gloomy (it predicts “a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees” - great).

The good news?  This is eminently tackle-able, especially through pretty basic technologies like better cooking stoves and smoke hoods. More good news?  Undertaking a major push on this would not only deliver immediate progress on reducing climate change, but would also save millions of lives and make a tangible difference to achieving the Millennium Development Goals. 

As Practical Action (one of the best NGOs in this area) summarise, more than a third of humanity (2.4 billion people) use biomass as their main cooking fuel, of whom 800m depend exclusively on crop residues and dung. Smoke in the home from these fires kills 1.6 million people a year – mainly women and kids. That’s more than malaria, and almost as much as poor water and sanitation. This WHO graph shows worldwide causes of death and illness:

While this one shows causes of death among under-fives:

So sorting out such stoves is one of those rare things, a genuine win-win. It’s also something the development community could actually deliver.  As a rule I’m sceptical when I see the aid world cheerfully adopting a throw-money-at-it approach – but one area where resource transfer can clearly achieve results is when (a) it’s geared towards getting stuff distributed, and (b) the stuff in question doesn’t depend on complex delivery systems (such as a functioning health sector).  In those conditions, donors can be extremely effective: look at distribution of bed-nets to combat malaria.

So: someone needs to initiate a major push on universal access to basic stoves and safe cooking technology.  But who has the standing to unite the climate world and the development world in this endeavour, and could also bring it to G8 or G20 summits for high level political cover? 

Sounds like a job for the SG to me.

Tomorrow sees the launch of a new Center on International Cooperation report on the subject of international institutions and climate change, co-authored by David and me (see also this story on the report in tomorrow’s Guardian). 

When we were commissioned to do the paper a few months ago by the UK Department for International Development, it quickly struck us that although the world has invested a massive amount of time and money in understanding both the science and the economics of climate change, we’re a long way behind in thinking through the kind of institutions that we’ll need in order to tackle the issue successfully.

It’s a strange oversight, when you think about it: after all, the challenge of climate change is above all one of leadership, of co-ordination and collective action - all of which come straight back to the question of institutions. The report is therefore a intended as a small contribution to the nascent global discussion about the new kinds of institution we need to tackle a new kind of global challenge.

The paper starts by setting out three scenarios for how institutions evolve to manage climate change – with varying degrees of success – between the Copenhagen summit at the end of 2009 and the year 2030.  Subsequent sections turn to the drivers that underpin the scenarios; an assessment of the multilateralism that we have now and its inadequacies for dealing with climate change; an exploration of the multilateralism that we’ll need, in order to tackle climate change successfully; and finally, how we might chart a path towards it.

The report argues that the most important thing that global institutions must deliver in order to stabilise the climate is what we call “signals from the future”. What we mean by this is that the way countries, companies and citizens behave today fundamentally depends on what they expect to happen in the future – so institutions must shape those expectations towards the desired outcome, and create a positive, self-fulfilling prophecy.

For if countries, companies and citizens expect a slow, tortuous transition to a low-carbon world, then it makes sense for them to free-ride on emissions reductions undertaken by others, to hedge their bets, to slow the process down.  If, on the other hand, they expect the low-carbon transition to happen quickly, then the incentives are instead for them to lead the change – in effect, to take part in a race to get out of carbon.  It’s either a virtous spiral or a vicious circle, in short – and institutions are the factor that can make the difference between the two.

To be able to send such signals from the future, we argue that radical global institutional change will be needed.  We need a framework that manages climate change over the full term of the challenge, based on a scientifically derived stabilisation target; a transparent, equitable formula – an ‘algorithm’, as we think of it – for sharing the global carbon budget out between the world’s nations; and a far more rigorous compliance and enforcement regime than the one agreed for Kyoto.  As we argue in the report,

It seems inevitable that a long-term climate deal will ultimately require an ‘all or nothing’ approach to international participation. Either countries play a full part in the system (and thus have access to international frameworks on finance, trade, development, energy and other resources, and perhaps even security); or they sit outside the international system and are effectively barred from all forms of international co-operation.

Carbon default, in other words, would be become as weighty an issue as sovereign default, or failure to comply with a Security Council resolution. That this should currently seem inconceivable indicates the extent of the shift in understanding that is still needed.

Avaaz must be delighted with this spoof of Exxon’s climate change ads.

Not only has it raised enough money to show its spot on CNN ($110k at time of publication), it’s already managed to provoke this self-pitying response from Exxon spokesman Alan Jeffers:

They seem to be critical of our desire to communicate our positions on climate change, which we don’t understand. If someone chooses to use our approach as a way to generate revenue or to make a point, I guess they’re free to do that.”

Memo to Jeffers: limping around like a harpooned walrus won’t make anyone love you.

In the US, Republicans and independents are becoming steadily more sceptical about climate change.

British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling has been trumpeting a “34% cut in UK emissions by 2020″ in his budget speech:

Today, I am presenting the world’s first ever carbon budget, which commits Britain to cut carbon emission by 34 per cent by 2020.

These budgets give industry the certainty needed to developed and use low carbon technology – cutting emissions, creating new businesses and jobs.

They are a landmark step, which point the way to the vital decisions which must be made at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit later this year.

But this cut is not quite what it seems. The baseline year isn’t 2009 or 2010, but 1990. UK emissions had already fallen 19.5% below 1990 levels in 2008 and will be falling fast in 2009 due to the recession. So the cut over 2010-2020 will be considerably less than 15%

If there’s a deal at Copenhagen, the UK will almost certainly have to do more. According to the background briefing, the UK aims to help the EU achieve a 20% cut by 2020 (again, against a 1990 benchmark). But Europe has said it will accept a 30% cut if others reciprocate – so the UK’s rather unambitious carbon budget may soon need to be tightened…

Update: The media seem quite happy to propogate the figure without explaining that it doesn’t mean what it seems to mean.

BBC:  Britain commits to cut carbon emissions by 34% by 2020

Guardian: Carbon budget commits UK to reduce emissions by 35% by 2020.

Telegraph: Chancellor presenting the world’s first ever carbon budget, committing Britain to cut carbon emissions by 34pc by 2020.

Times: Commits to cutting carbon emissions by 34% by 2020

Independent: Chancellor, presenting the world’s first carbon budget, committed Britain to cut carbon emissions by 34 per cent by 2020.

I have long thought that we’ll live to regret our failure to use the current crisis to nudge the global economy onto a greener trajectory. A WWF/E3G report, published today, heightens this fear.

By weighting elements of national stimulus packages, it offers a quick and dirty estimate of how green each one is. The answer is ‘not very’ with the UK’s risible effort one of the worst offenders.

The share of ‘climate friendly’ stimulus is small, researcher find, and it’s more than offset by investment in roads (including one to Manchester airport) and fossil fuel R&D (yes – read that and weep).

You can quibble with the analysis. Investment in nuclear is not included on the green side of the ledger – which seems unfair on the French, who have low per capita emissions relative to GDP and expect additional nuclear investment to push them lower. But the scoring is transparent and easy for others to replicate with different weightings.

And there’s a much bigger point: why is it up to a couple of NGOs to do this work? By now, the G20 should have set up standardised and sophisticated systems for monitoring the net carbon impact of each country’s stimulus package.

That they haven’t shows how confused and fragmented our thinking remains about the interlocking crises the world faces.

Disclosure: I recently agreed to act as an adviser to E3G in the run up to Copenhagen, but have had no involvement in any aspect of this report.