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.

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.

Not all failures are equal, clearly. Some outcomes boost the prospects of eventual success. Others will push the climate process towards semi-permanent dysfunction, an equilibrium that will probably only be shifted by future climate catastrophe.

Good and bad outcomes do not split neatly across our scenarios for failure. Neither will they necessarily be immediately obvious to climate insiders, whose judgement is (understandably) swayed by optimism bias (success is always just around the corner) and a partiality for politeness strategies (obfuscating red lines with technical language; not tackling opponents in public, etc).

Bali #2 – a high level political declaration with little real substance – could be a good deal, and will almost certainly be heralded as such by governments keen to garner good headlines. But there’s a strong chance that it’s simply the prelude to future failure – especially if:

(i) Healthcare continues to block the path to a US Senate bill; (ii) there is ambiguity between countries on the eventual legal status of a deal; (iii) the US and China are at loggerheads, or are huddling in a low ambition coalition; (iv) obvious bear traps – especially Monitoring, Reporting and Verification  - have not been cleared away; or (v) the roadmap to an agreement has no clear timetable or a timetable based on more than wishful thinking.

If enough of these conditions are met, then all Bali #2 does is to defer failure to a bis follow-up – or, more likely, all the way through to the COP16 summit in December 2010. Given wriggle room, the Senate will not able to resist elbowing its way into the talks, larding its Bill with conditions designed to provoke the Chinese, while undermining Obama’s primacy in international negotiations.

Pro-deal campaigners may well let up the pressure, their funds and momentum exhausted by a premature push at Copenhagen. The anti-climate lobby, in contrast, will be energised by blood in the water – and will attract additional funding as a result. Even if a deal is sealed in the spring, the process will still not be out of the woods – as we discuss in our Death by Climatocracy scenario).

Bad Deal is the worst possible outcome.  If overall targets for developed countries are either non-existent or well below the 25-40% reduction beneath 1990 levels needed by 2020, and if there’s no clear resolution of the long term position of developing countries, then valuable political bandwidth has been expended on a deal that simply isn’t up to the job.

Advocates of a serious deal will then have no option other than to ‘go into opposition’ and exert continued pressure against the status quo – although European countries in particular will be sorely tempted to play along, pretending that the deal, however weak, gives the world something to build on.

Car Crash is the most difficult scenario to judge. It will grab headlines, and horrify insiders. But if negotiators must stare into the abyss, it is surely better that they do so at Copenhagen, rather than at the bis, in Mexico in a years’ time, or on the road to implementation in 2012. Indeed, breakdown at Copenhagen could actually be cathartic and help to tee up more ambitious action. Crucially, though, this will only happen if:

- The crash is spectacular, and clarifies differences between countries – thus catalysing a long-overdue discussion about the principles that must underpin a global deal.

- The ‘last straw’ is a totemic issue that can subsequently be tackled and seen to be resolved.  By contrast, the crash must not be over some abstruse technical point that the media can’t explain (as for instance when WTO trade talks collapsed over the obscure Special Safeguard Mechanism in July last year).

- Leaders are confronted by their personal responsibility for a failure of imagination that history is certain to judge harshly.

Next up – how to respond to failure…

Weakness on China is especially egregious now that the country is above average global per capita emissions. Campaigners should be demanding that China ties itself to a date when its emissions will peak and then to commits to deep cuts by mid-century. (Armed with such a commitment, of course, China itself could then begin to turn the heat up on America – rather than allowing the US congress to bleat about US competitiveness.)

A failure to ask hard questions of China is bad for lower income countries. Not only will they suffer worst as the climate changes, they are going to wake up in ten years’ time to find that most of the global carbon budget for 2 degrees has been spent. Their interests are being sacrificed on the altar of G77 solidarity, with the global NGO community helping sharpen the knife.

The problem is similar, if less extreme, for the world’s other rising powers. Their per capita emissions may be lower than China’s and NGOs less terrified of offending them. But still, a country like India has 17% of the world’s population – which gives it quite a stake in our collective future. It is also massively vulnerable to a changing climate (especially as a lack of water disrupts food production).

But yet India is notoriously rubbish at international climate talks. So all the more credit to Malini Mehra, from the Center for Social Markets, for her persistent (and unusual) attempts to shine a light on India’s failings.

“In recent months, India has sought to challenge its image overseas, and in growing quarters at home, as recalcitrant and obstructionist on climate change,” she writes in her latest critique.

“[But] in a showdown this week with the old guard, the reformist environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, had to tone down his climate advice to India’s Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh. Political correctness won, but the loser was India’s climate security.”

Here’s the rest of her analysis:

In a tumultuous week for Indian climate politics that saw Delhi hosting a major UN technology and climate change conference, a regional meeting of South Asian environment ministers, a Sino-India climate change workshop, and MOUs with China, Japan and Norway, the political air is charged. As the week opened, the driver-in-chief of these high-level meetings, Jairam Ramesh, was engulfed in a firestorm over a leaked confidential communication to the Prime Minister.

As the Major Economies Forum got underway in London with Gordon Brown saying there was no ‘Plan B’ for Copenhagen, news broke in Delhi that Jairam Ramesh had allegedly proposed dumping the Kyoto Protocol, ditching the G77 in favour of the G20, and taking on carbon cuts without concomitant financial or technical guarantees. In a country with a well-entrenched political consensus on India’s role in international climate negotiations, the Minister’s alleged remarks were seized on as heresy. Partisan press reporting, well-oiled with anonymous quotes by India’s aggrieved negotiators and threats to resign, added fuel to the fire. Outraged opposition parties railed that the Minister had capitulated to the United States and NGOs charged him with damaging India’s credibility with developing country partners.

In the storm that followed, the papers were full of indignation at Ramesh’s supposed deviation from India’s traditional hard-line climate position, but silent on India’s climate risk.  No words spent on why it might make sense to be ‘flexible’ on climate change. No effort to explain why new approaches were imperative if India wanted to craft a fiendishly difficult global climate compact. Instead, everything was cast as a sell-out to western interests – an unedifying neo-colonial spectacle more focussed on political point scoring than protecting India’s people. Why is it that we are more concerned with doctrinal purity than climate catastrophe?

We have been down this road before. In July just after the G8 meeting in L’Aquila when Dr. Manmohan Singh acceded to language agreeing a 2 degree Celsius limit to warming, a similar political firestorm erupted. His actions were also interpreted as a capitulation to western interests and a restraint on India’s right to development.

Confusing degrees with percentages, some politicians screamed about agreeing to “two per cent” under U.S. pressure.  That the Maldives and Bangladesh were asking for a 1.5 degrees limit with much deeper emissions cuts by all nations, went unreported. As President Nasheed of the Maldives, the world’s lowest-lying island nation, said in Delhi last week: “with so much damage being caused by less than one degree of warming, why on earth would we aim for two degrees?” At present trends, we are heading towards a 6 to 7 degree world by 2100. As the world’s fourth largest emitter and potentially the worst victim of climate change, India cannot afford the complacency its political class is fostering. Our water and food security lie wounded, our coastal aquifers are turning saline, our glaciers are melting.

Ramesh’s suggested shift in India’s hard stance has created momentum in climate talks, forcing developed countries to contemplate much deeper cuts than they wanted. A new set of possibilities has thus opened up that might just manage to dispel mutual fears of inaction and mistrust. The Minister no doubt had to publicly step back towards the party-line on India’s climate negotiating position, but he opened a deadlocked debate and let fresh air in.

Interestingly, China, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and even Indonesia are all considering variations of domestic emissions peaking, national and sectoral caps – not in response to western arm-twisting but in response to increasingly unequivocal climate impact projections, energy security, development and economic competitiveness concerns. Though the uproar over his reformist advice has momentarily slowed his pace, a new political consensus on climate is forming. It has hidden, powerful supporters both within government and the opposition who are poised to occupy the climate spotlight and will have to respond to India’s 670 million farmers and 100 million fisherfolk who are sure to ask: “If you knew about this climate threat, why did you keep it from us and why did you not act in time?”

Meanwhile the science races on. Climate change is occurring faster and deeper than previously thought – while India’s politics remains stuck. Ramesh has let the reform genie out of the bottle. New constituencies are clamouring for change. Hopefully the world will finally get the debate it deserves and India the politicians we deserve.