In a pastiche of Kennedy’s man on the moon speech, I imagined President Obama laying down the following gauntlet to the world:

I believe that the world should commit itself to achieving the goal of stopping the inexorable rise in greenhouse gas emissions that is doing so much to put our planet in peril. I don’t believe we should aim to achieve this goal in 2020 or 2030 or 2050 – but right now in 2009, making this year the high water mark for mankind’s global experiment with the global climate.

Obviously this didn’t happen, but – gradually – we’re learning more about has happened to emissions. The figures for US carbon dioxide  for 2009 are now in and the good news is that they fell by an astonishing 9%.

Question is: has the US stimulus been wisely spent on measures that will push the economy onto a lower carbon path as it grows again? The answer is probably not, though there is some reason for hope:

As the economy recovers, the structure of that recovery will be important to the future emissions profile of the United States.  If energy-intensive industries lead the economic recovery, emissions would increase faster than if service industries or light manufacturing play the leading role.   If coal, which was more heavily impacted by the recent economic downturn than other energy sources, rebounds disproportionately, the carbon intensity of the energy supply could rise above the 2009 level.

However, longer-term trends continue to suggest decline in both the amount of energy used per unit of economic output and the carbon intensity of our energy supply, which both work to restrain emissions.

The world is at a major inflection point on its carbon trajectory, but I fear we’re going to blunder through it without realising the opportunity for transformation. As Copenhagen showed, unfortunately, we’re still a long, long way from reframing climate change as a now problem. But it’s still not too late to start working for peak emissions.

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.

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.

The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful “deal” so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen.

China’s strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world’s poor once again. And sure enough, the aid agencies, civil society movements and environmental groups all took the bait. The failure was “the inevitable result of rich countries refusing adequately and fairly to shoulder their overwhelming responsibility”, said Christian Aid. “Rich countries have bullied developing nations,” fumed Friends of the Earth International.

All very predictable, but the complete opposite of the truth. Even George Monbiot, writing in yesterday’s Guardian, made the mistake of singly blaming Obama. But I saw Obama fighting desperately to salvage a deal, and the Chinese delegate saying “no”, over and over again. Monbiot even approvingly quoted the Sudanese delegate Lumumba Di-Aping, who denounced the Copenhagen accord as “a suicide pact, an incineration pact, in order to maintain the economic dominance of a few countries”.

Sudan behaves at the talks as a puppet of China; one of a number of countries that relieves the Chinese delegation of having to fight its battles in open sessions. It was a perfect stitch-up. China gutted the deal behind the scenes, and then left its proxies to savage it in public.

Meanwhile, the FT observes, cracks are starting to appear among the emerging economies:

Cracks emerged on Tuesday in the alliance on climate change formed at the Copenhagen conference last week, with leading developing countries criticising the resulting accord.The so-called Basic countries – Brazil, South Africa, India and China – backed the accord in a meeting with the US on Friday night, and it was also supported by almost all other nations at the talks, including all of the biggest emitters.

But on Tuesday the Brazilian government labelled the accord “disappointing” and complained that the financial assistance it contained from rich to poor countries was insufficient. South Africa also raised objections: Buyelwa Sonjica, the environment minister, called the failure to produce a legally binding agreement “unacceptable”. She said her government had considered leaving the meeting. “We are not defending this, as I have indicated, for us it is not acceptable, it is definitely not acceptable,” she said.

The picture is a bleak one – there’s no point pretending otherwise. Copenhagen took us only a little further than Bali, despite two years of negotiations. In some crucial aspects, we actually seem further away from a robust and comprehensive climate deal than we were in 2007.

Rather than hitting the brakes, however, we argue that deal-makers need to steer into the skid – upping the level of ambition. Climate isn’t a problem that can simply be put on pause.

Believe the science (and most still do), and you have little choice but to find new ways of bringing countries into some kind of binding agreement to control emissions.

That means finally getting countries to lay all their cards out on the table. Copenhagen failed, in part, because governments were far too slow to level with each other about what they really wanted. They spent two years pussy-footing around – and were then surprised when it proved difficult to engage in Copenhagen’s frenetic last few days.

How can we ever get to a deal when it’s considered perfectly acceptable to talk about rigorous (and often unachievable) targets for 2050 – but a faux pas to talk about the tough decisions and painful trade offs that need to be taken over the next few years if the climate is to be pushed onto any stabilisation trajectory?

That’s why much of our report is about getting back to the basics – taking 2ºC as a starting point, and then building up the blocks that are needed to seize the increasingly slim chance of making that aspiration a reality.

We’re not talking complex concepts – but the available carbon budget to 2050 (the size of the cake); current per capita emissions (which provide a starting point for the fair allocation of that cake); and a date for global peak emissions (how much of the cake we plan to consume now vs the portion we’ll save for later).

Read this admirable Project Catalyst analysis and you can understand in just ten minutes the gulf that exists between us and 2ºC – but, at the same time, realise that bridging the gap is far from being an insuperable challenge.

2ºC and a stabilisation target of 450ppm CO2e remain the very best results we can now hope for (which is why 1.5ºC and 350ppm has been such a diversion) – but unless we start talking in practical and urgent terms about how to achieve these goals, they will slip away much sooner than we think.

Leaders also need to initiate a much more adult conversation with their citizens about the level of climate risk societies are prepared to accept. Climate science is the bedrock of any global deal (and we make recommendations for how the integrity of the IPCC should be protected), but it can often only reveal considerable, and worrying, uncertainties about how the climate system will react as we continue to throw vast quantities of greenhouse gases at it.

Climate change is frightening not because we know exactly what is going to happen, and when – but because we don’t know when a particular part of it might start to run out of control.

Talking about – and trying to understand – risk is important, but we also need to invest much more in exploring and explaining potential solutions, making the low carbon economy tangible to the public, and helping amplify the signals from the future that will persuade investors to ramp up the race out of carbon.

We also need to join the dots between climate and other issues. Another resource spike is probably on its way – how can we start to address climate when limited space for emissions is just one of a number of scarcity issues (with energy, water, food and land completing the set).

These strategic resources will have a transformative impact on geopolitics over the next decade (for better or worse), changing economies, reshaping societies, and creating a raft of new security problems. We need to start building resilient societies – the subject of a much longer paper on risk and resilience that Brookings will publish next year.

Three of our recommendations explore how to start designing the institutional systems that are needed to underpin a rapid low carbon transformation.

Most tangibly, we call for an International Climate Performance Committee to be created and given the job of providing rapid, authoritative and independent analysis of the world’s chances of meeting a 2ºC target.

The ICPC would do a similar job on climate on climate as the Congressional Budget Office does for US spending commitments – able to report regularly on deficits, but also able to inject data into the thick of a negotiation.

If the ICPC was already up and running, negotiators would not rely on leaked documents to tell them what their commitments added up to – every country would have the same robust analysis on what emissions trajectory they could be expected to take the world onto.

We could also expect the ICPC to chip in at the end of January, when all countries are supposed to submit the targets and other commitments they are willing to contribute to 2ºC.

On targets, we  argue that rich countries should now commit to creating incentives for poor countries to volunteer to take on binding targets – even if these are set some way above current emissions levels. Carbon is a scarce resource, the right to emit is thus a valuable one. Developing countries are missing out on the chance to exploit their carbon allocations in the last few decades before these permits are squeezed down to near zero.

Finally, we discuss Ban Ki-Moon’s proposal to set up a High Level Panel on climate and give it our enthusiastic endorsement. The Panel offers an opportunity to ask some of the big questions that we have thus far shied away from addressing – starving the Copenhagen process of essential vision, content, and strategy.

The Panel, we argue, should be staffed by visionary thinkers (and some heads of state) from outside the climate priesthood. They should be mandated to:

- Explore the institutional framework needed to achieve the UNFCCC’s long term climate stabilisation objective.
- Examine how international collective action can increase resilience to a changing climate at global, regional, national, and local levels.
- Analyse the implications of climate change and climate change policy for other parts of the international system, including security, economic governance, international development, and human rights.
- Set out a high level strategy for increasing the effectiveness, coherence and credibility of the international system, with objectives for the short and medium term (e.g. to allow implementation of a post-2012 global deal; to put the world on a path to stabilisation by 2030).

Here’s a summary of our twelve recommendations:

- Focus debate on solutions by: (i) Rebuilding trust in the science; (ii) Initiating a more mature discussion of climate risk; (iii) Creating a common language to help deal-making (budgets, peak and per capita emissions).

- Make the low carbon economy tangible by: (i) Pursuing quick wins alongside the post-Copenhagen process; (ii) Building low carbon into the fiscal tightening; (iii) Creating a new focus on disruptive technologies.

- Connect the dots between climate and other global issues by: (i) Getting ready for the next resource price spike; (ii) Recognising and welcoming the inevitability of carbon tariffs; (iii) Focusing development strategies on building resilience.

- Correct the institutional deficit on climate change by: (i) Setting up a new International Climate Performance Committee; (ii) Creating incentives for developing countries to take on binding targets; (iii) Using the forthcoming UN High Level Panel on Climate and Development as a key avenue for progress.