My own take on this is that when we think about public opinion in the climate context, we’re a bit too fast to look at it through the lens of NGOs and the media – both of which had, I think, a terrible summit at Copenhagen.

Take NGOs first. For the most part, they concentrated on highly technical issues, as they have throughout the past decade – acting, in other words, like negotiators despite not having any bargaining chips. When they tried to look up a bit, and set an overall agenda, it was so vague as to be meaningless (“ambitious, fair, binding” – more on that here). Finally, as the summit fell apart, they retreated to their habitual comfort zone of arguing that it was all the fault of the US and EU, who had been unforgivably horrid to poor old China. (See Mark Lynas for a blistering critique of that view.)

Then, of course, there’s the feral nature of the 24/7 news media, which cheerfully overlooks its own agenda-setting role even as it peddles its sensationalised stories of stitch-ups, scandals and show-downs.

The Guardian’s John Vidal deserves singling out for an especially dishonourable mention here. Just two days in to Copenhagen, he ran a breathless piece saying that Copenhagen was “in disarray” following the leak of a draft agreement that “would hand more power to rich nations”. Never mind that the content of his piece was highly questionable (as we pointed out on GD at the time). The effect was to poison the atmosphere just as the summit began – leading the Indian environment minister to say in April this year that the summit had been “destroyed from the start” by the Guardian leak. Nice one, John!

So given that it would appear to be unwise to expect either NGOs or the media to help shape public opinion more constructively, what’s left? One suggestion at the conference was a bigger role for faith leaders – who are indeed getting steadily more active on climate.  

But my hunch is that it’s social networking technologies that are the key opinion formers to watch.

We’ve seen how breathtakingly fast they are at aggregating information – as during the Mumbai attacks, for instance, where Twitter was consistently 60-90 minutes ahead of the news media.  We’ve seen how they aggregate opinion as well as information – which can of course be as much of a curse as a blessing.  And we’ve seen how they can organise action – not just protest, but also more proactive policy solutions.

But what we haven’t seen, yet, is how all these elements could combine in the face of stronger climate impacts  - not just an extreme weather event, but an impact that could really trigger awareness of the potential for irreversible shifts. Strikes me that social networking technologies would be a highly unpredictable and interesting wild card in such circumstances – and potentially rather more useful than either NGOs or the media.

Question:  India has said that it’s put forward a candidate to replace Mr. [Yvo] de Boer on the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change].  It’s named the individual, and said that it has the support of China and other BRIC nations.  I just wondered, first, can you confirm that names have been received by the Secretary-General for that post?  How many names and what’s the process for selection?

Spokesperson:  I can’t confirm whether specific names have been given or not.  Clearly, there is a process that’s under way.  This is an appointment that is indeed made by the Secretary-General in consultation with the Board of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.  There is still a way to go in that selection process, and I don’t want to get into details here

So who might India’s candidate be? Over to wire coverage a day earlier from Indo Asian News Service (which seems to have been barely noticed outside India):

Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has written to the United Nations backing the candidature of Vijai Sharma, secretary with the ministry, for the post of executive secretary of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The minister said here Wednesday that China has already supported the move.

‘Vijai Sharma is our official candidate for UNFCCC executive secretary. I have written to the United Nations Monday and have also written to BASIC (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) countries seeking their support. We have got support from China already for his candidature and we will get support from other BASIC countries,’ Ramesh said at an interaction at the Indian Women’s Press Corps.

Ramesh said the time has come for the post to go to a developing country. ‘The first three secretaries have all been from developed countries and Vijai Sharma has long years of experience with UNFCCC. He was chief spokesperson for G77 for Kyoto negotiations. I am pursuing it. I am not sure as European countries and the US will prefer somebody from a smaller country and India is unarguably at a different profile but I would like to see him there,’ the minister said.

Sharma – a career bureacrat - is well-respected inside the UNFCCC process as far as I can make out.  But I wonder whether India’s making a tactical error in equating “developing country” interests with those of the BASIC grouping of emerging economies. At Copenhagen, BASIC’s hardline position was conspicuously not in the interests of the least developed countries who stand most to lose from climate change.  It’ll be interesting to see whether an alternative developing country candidate comes forward – one from the ‘survival’ rather than the ‘growth’ faction of the G77.

My understanding is that BASIC was formed at China’s instigation. China agreed a Memorandum of Understanding with India in October 2009, committing the two countries to working closely together at Copenhagen. It then invited Brazil and South Africa to join the party, at a meeting in Beijing a week before Copenhagen started. Sudan was also invited to represent the G77.

According to Jairam Ramesh, India’s environment minister, the four countries decided that they’d walk out of Copenhagen together if necessary:

We will not exit in isolation. We will co-ordinate our exit if any of our non-negotiable terms is violated. Our entry and exit will be collective.

During Copenhagen, China worked extremely closely with India, with the two delegations meeting up to six times a day. It also engaged intensively with the other members of BASIC. In the final meeting with the Americans, China agreed to accept a limited international monitoring of its targets (India claims to have pushed China on this point).

The decision was also taken to drop language, setting a deadline for turning the Copenhagen Accord into a legally binding agreement. South Africa and Brazil both appear to have been unhappy with this decision.

Since Copenhagen, the BASIC countries have met once and have agreed to continue to get together on a regular basis. They want the Copenhagen Accord to set the stage for a ‘twin track’ agreement – with tough and binding targets for developed countries through Kyoto #2 and voluntary commitments for themselves under a new agreement.

No-one really knows how the US would fit into this picture. It is also increasingly clear that they and the US left Copenhagen with quite different impressions of what will happen next. The US believes that large emerging economies now have “very explicit activities and obligations”. I don’t think they believe they are committed to anything significant, beyond what they agreed at Bali or put on the table on a voluntary basis before Copenhagen started.

Over the past few days, the BASIC countries have lodged their “mitigation actions” with the UNFCCC, meeting a Jan 31^st deadline. Here are the highlights:

China and India have submitted their commitments using exactly the same form of words. They are both prepared to increase decrease their carbon intensity by set amounts – 40-45% for China; 20-25% for India.

These commitments are made reliant on “financial resources and transfer of technology” from the developed countries, in line with the 1992 Convention, though China has elsewhere made it clear that it isn’t expecting to get much money.

China also offers a bit more detail on its plans than India – saying it will “increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 15% by 2020 and increase forest coverage by 40 million hectares and forest stock volume by 1.3 billion cubic meters by 2020 from the 2005 levels.”

Brazil goes quite a bit further, setting out a fairly detailed action plan that it says it expects will reduce its emissions by 36.1%-38.9% against business-as-usual by 2020.

This is a more robust target than China or India’s – as it implies a cap for emissions in 2020 (if that is, the Brazilians publish – or have published – what they expect BAU to be). China and India’s expected emissions can only be calculated if one makes assumptions about their economic growth.

South Africa, meanwhile, underlines that it negotiated both as part of a broader group of countries working for a deal, and within the BASIC coalition, disassociating itself ever so slightly from BASIC’s robust line during Copenhagen’s endgame.

Like Brazil, it sets out a 34% deviation below business-as-usual in 2020, and a 42% deviation by 2025. Its figures are based on this study.

It also, with some hedging, commits itself to a peak year for its emissions:

With financial and capacity building support from the international community, this level of effort will enable South Africa’s greenhouse gas emissions to peak between 2020 and 2025, plateau for approximately a decade and decline in absolute terms thereafter.

Try asking the Chinese governments when it expects the country’s emissions to peak and you’ll be as welcome in Beijing as Larry Page and Sergey Brin. It’s worth noting, though, that South Africa emits much more than China on a per capita basis and has comparable emissions intensity – facts that it admits puts it “in a difficult position” in climate negotiations.

My conclusions:

• BASIC is here to stay, but it’s not entirely on the same page as yet. The four countries talked recently about harmonising their commitments on emissions – it’s not clear how that will happen.
• If I had to guess, I’d say that China will be able to keep the alliance together – and probably will also keep the G77 on side. (The latter is probably bad for poor countries, with high climate vulnerability and low emissions.)
• BASIC, the US, and the EU are also some way apart, despite their willingness to sign up to the Copenhagen Accord. BASIC thinks the Bali negotiations are ongoing. The US thinks negotiations have been put onto a new footing. The Europeans are hoping for the best.
• It’s going to be another rocky year for the international climate regime, especially with few governments expecting cap and trade to pass the US Senate.

In Politico, Martin Kady II looks on the bright side. Yes, healthcare may now be dead (many Democrats seem to be abandoning it without a fight – though I suppose that could change over the next 24 hours) – but Obama can still get other key parts of his agenda through Congress, Kady believes.

Unfortunately, on climate, what looks bright to Kady is likely to look exceptionally gloomy to those outside America’s borders.

A cap-and-trade bill has a shot in the Senate – as long as the cap-and- trade part is removed. If Democrats dump that toxic measure and pursue a more modest climate and energy bill, they’ve actually got a shot at getting something done – and getting a few Republican votes to push them past 60.

Voinovich and Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.) are working on a smaller-scale proposal that would limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. And moderate Democrats are pushing Senate leadership to drop the cap-and- trade provision in favor of an energy-only bill, which could include renewable fuels standard tax incentives for alternative energy…

“It is my assessment that we likely will not do a climate change bill this year, but we will do energy,” Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) said Tuesday. “I think it is more likely for us to turn to something that is bipartisan and will address the country’s energy interest and begin to address specific policies on climate change.”

The Voinovich-Lugar bill will do little to cap, let alone reduce, emissions. Voinovich is certainly no fan of action on climate change. He has been holding out for a new analysis of cap and trade from EPA – believing the agency is holding back information on the true costs.

His main priority is reduce America’s dependency on the Middle East, wanting the US to become the least dependent on imported oil of any country in the world. He’s thinks the US should go after “every drop” of its oil shale and should also invest heavily in using coal as a substitute for oil.

On climate itself, he thinks the 17% emissions reduction by 2020 on 2005 levels, which President Obama promised at Copenhagen, is much too ambitious. He sees little point in the US reducing its emissions if China and India don’t do the same.

If Voinovich is now the best hope for getting bipartisan support for US domestic legislation, then I think Copenhagen’s prospects are grim indeed. Expect it be starring in its own Monty Python sketch sometime around the time of the US mid-terms.

Click here to view the embedded video.

As Barack Obama explained, these commitments “will not be legally binding, but what [they] will do is allow for each country to show to the world what they’re doing… and we”ll know who is meeting and who’s not meeting the mutual obligations that have been set forth.”

In other words, this is ‘pledge and review’ – the non-binding, bottom up approach that the United States favoured in the run up to Kyoto, before it surprised everyone by announcing that it was prepared to accept a legally binding protocol at the Geneva climate conference in 1996.

The US then agreed at Kyoto to a 7% cut in its emissions by 2012 on a 1990 benchmark, but failed to ratify the treaty. It is now offering a 17% cut on 2005 levels by 2020, on a non-binding basis – which would take its emissions more or less back to where they were in 1990. (The EU is promising a 20-30% cut on 1990 levels by 2020.)

But the US has a credibility problem. Not only did it use the Kyoto years to pump out as much CO2 as it could, the Senate is yet to pass domestic legislation and, with healthcare stalled, and financial regulation next in the queue of ‘big bills’ – there’s long been a big question mark on whether it will ever will.

The Copenhagen Accord, and especially China’s willingness to accept some kind of international monitoring of its emissions reductions, was supposed to make it easier for the President to push the bill over the line, but that depends heavily on (a) his political credibility; (b) whether he can keep together a very shaky Democrat alliance on the bill, perhaps bolstered by the odd Republican prepared to commit political suicide.

Which brings us to today – when the Democrats face, according to Nate Silver, a 75% chance of losing Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat in a special election. If the hapless Martha Coakley does lose (I actually think she may scrape it, but she’s clearly now the outsider), it’s going to make a climate bill seem a very long way away indeed.

One thing is sure. Scott Brown won’t be voting for emissions reductions any time soon. He’s solidly in the mainstream of Republican thinking on the issue. Asked recently if global warming was a fraud, he answered:

It’s interesting. I think the globe is always heating and cooling. It’s a natural way of ebb and flow. The thing that concerns me lately is some of the information I’ve heard about potential tampering with some of the information.

I just want to make sure if in fact . . . the earth is heating up, that we have accurate information, and it’s unbiased by scientists with no agenda. Once that’s done, then I think we can really move forward with a good plan.

And if the Democrats lose the seat and their super-majority in the Senate, will the US still feel able to pledge a 17% emissions cut in their submission on Copenhagen on Jan 31st? And, if they do, will anyone believe they have the political will to meet the commitment? The answers to those questions are – probably yes; almost certainly not.

Alex and I have wondered for some time whether the climate risks becoming a zombie process (shuffling and groaning, but never quite dying) – but perhaps we’re wrong. Maybe Copenhagen is going to be dead sooner than we thought. It certainly doesn’t look good if the Democrats lose a Senate seat that Kennedy held for them from 1962, just a year after Obama was born.

The survey finds that in terms of personal priorities, cutting the deficit is top-of-the-league. Helping small businesses is priority two and reducing welfare bills is priority three. Interestingly, three issues associated with the modernising agenda (civil liberties, defending the NHS and fighting poverty) score above winning powers back from Europe and reducing the level of immigration.

At the bottom of the league table of personal priorities is a reduction in Britain’s carbon footprint. Just eight adopted candidates said it would be a top priority for them in the next parliament. It was the only policy goal that fell below 3.0 (the middle ranking). If the Tory leadership presses ahead with a decarbonisation strategy it will need to redouble Greg Clark’s tactic of emphasising the wider benefits of all green measures (eg in terms of energy security or household fuel bills). Candidates’ ‘green scepticism’ is shared by the Tory grassroots. 76% of Conservative members want Cameron to focus on energy bills above climate change.

First, an excerpt from the New York Times yesterday.  We join Bono, a contributing columnist at the Times, as he’s setting out a list of 10 ideas that might make the next 10 years “more interesting, healthy or civil” – ideas which “have little in common with one another except that I am seized by each, and moved by its potential to change our world.” Here’s number 3:

In the recent climate talks in Copenhagen, it was no surprise that developing countries objected to taking their feet off the pedal of their own carbon-paced growth; after all, they played little part in building the congested eight-lane highway of a problem that the world faces now.

One smart suggestion I’ve heard, sort of a riff on cap-and-trade, is that each person has an equal right to pollute and that there might somehow be a way to monetize this. By this accounting, your average Ethiopian can sell her underpolluting ways (people in Ethiopia emit about 0.1 ton of carbon a year) to the average American (about 20 tons a year) and use the proceeds to deal with the effects of climate change (like drought), educate her kids and send them to university. (Trust in capitalism — we’ll find a way.) As a mild green, I like the idea, though it’s controversial in militant, khaki-green quarters. And yes, real economists would prefer to tax carbon at the source, but so far the political will is not there. If it were me, I’d close the deal before the rising nations want it backdated.

Bono just endorsed contraction and convergence – a big deal, for three reasons.

First, it’s clear he gets the key things that you have to get. He gets that the real potential is not in everyone having equal per capita emissions, but in everyone having equal per capita emission entitlements - the difference being, as he says, that with the latter, trading enables low emitters to profit from it while still staying within the overall emissions budget. (Fuller explanation of that point here.)

He also gets, consequently, that we’re talking about a potentially very important new source of finance for development – one that’s different from aid. This is especially important when public finances are about to experience massive cutbacks in a lot of OECD donor countries, with aid budgets probably among the first casualties.

And he gets that the clock is ticking (“If it were me, I’d close the deal before the rising nations want it backdated”). As David and I note in the post-Copenhagen analysis we did for Brookings, the risk of waiting later and later and later to start talking seriously about developing countries’ fair share of the global emissions budget - something we’ve been doing for years, and are still doing now –  is that developing countries will find that all or most of the available carbon budget to 2050 will have been used up before they come to the table. Hardly promising conditions for a serious global deal.

Second, Bono’s advocacy is a big deal because it could really jump-start the process of strategic renewal so badly needed among the NGOs campaigning on climate change.

NGOs had an appalling year in the run-up to Copenhagen.  Throughout last year, the main NGO coalition, tcktcktck.org, was vague about its headline policy asks (“ambitious, binding, fair” – but no definition of what these words actually meant). Then the green NGOs blundered into the start of Copenhagen by proposing a peak year for global emissions two years later than the IPCC said was needed. And by the end of the summit, they had collapsed back into the usual rhetoric about rich countries bullying poor countries – overlooking, as Mark Lynas stressed in his must-read Guardian piece, the extent to which actually, something different was going on at the summit.

Last year saw development NGOs increasingly trying to push the wider civil society coalitions towards a more effective stance. They didn’t always (or even often) succeed; but behind the scenes, they were doing as much as they could. When that wasn’t enough, to their credit, agencies like Avaaz and Oxfam proved willing to break visibly with green NGOs on key issues – like what the global peak emissions year should be. So far, though, the ONE Campaign - with its very considerable advocacy firepower - has kept a low profile in all this.  Its main focus in the climate context has been on additional finance for development to tackle climate change – rather than on emissions trading as a source of additional finance for development.

Bono’s article potentially changes all that, given his passing acquintanceship with ONE.  If so, then the significance is not just that it brings another highly effective development NGO into play on the big game. It’s also that it potentially encourages the emerging development / climate coalition to focus on the two biggest questions on the table: what’s the size of a safe global emissions budget, and what’s the fairest way to share it out.

Love him or hate him, Bono’s one of the few people that can take a radical, very far-reaching idea like equal shares to the atmosphere as the foundation for a global deal on climate and just mainstream it – with the UN Secretary-General, with the World Economic Forum, with the Pope, whoever. Which bring me to the third reason why this is a big deal. Not only can Bono and the ONE Campaign pitch this idea to Ban Ki-moon, WEF or Benedict XVI. He can pitch it to the most important group of all right now: G77 leaders.

He can get access to the people who most need to recognise that not only is their solidarity with China on ‘no-targets-for-developing-countries’ harming their long term future by preventing a global climate deal, given that they’re in the front line of climate impacts – it’s also ensuring that they miss out on a potentially huge new flow of finance for development. A simple message that might, just might, get low income countries demanding their fair share of the atmosphere - in doing so, becoming some of the very strongest advocates of an effective global deal. Cross your fingers.

Can you spot what’s missing? Answer after the jump.

Yup: climate change. In fact, as the NYT’s Andrew Revkin points out, environmental issues as a whole, including climate, ran to a total of just 1.5 per cent of US news coverage last year. Not the most hopeful starting point for trying to resurrect prospects of a global deal in the wake of Copenhagen (and btw in case you missed it, here’s another link to David and my Brookings analysis of Copenhagen and what needs to come next).

That said, the festive period did also see one very positive development on the climate front during the festive period – on which more tomorrow. For now: happy new year!