The climate clock is ticking, but civil society is still missing in action. With only nine months to go before the Copenhagen climate summit, the world’s NGOs are far from having a compelling set of demands to campaign on.
Perhaps it is already too late. Many governments are already ramping back their expectations of what can be delivered. The deal-makers among them now desperately need civil society to change the terms of debate and boost all countries’ level of ambition.
I’d give campaigners until April’s London Summit to get their act together. After that, they have zero chance of retaking the high ground and starting to shape the pre-Copenhagen agenda.
So what should their demands be? What makes a good headline ‘ask’?
First, it has to fit with the science – that means stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at 450ppm CO2e (nothing lower is now possible).
Then, it needs to make sense to insiders – people who are making the major policy or investment decisions a clear sense of what they need to do now.
Third, it must communicate to a wider public – which means a goal that the average 12 year-old (or journalist) can understand and remember.
And finally, it needs to build climate into a wider post-meltdown narrative, offering an integrated vision for global recovery.
I think one clear, crisp demand fulfils all these criteria, providing a starting point from which all key elements of a global deal logically flow. Global greenhouse gas emissions exploded during the boom years, pumped up by debt-fuelled overconsumption. Now oil demand is declining – and we can expect global emissions see a modest fall too.
This provides civil society with a real opportunity. They should declare 2009 the year of peak emissions and challenge the world’s governments to develop a concrete plan to ensure they are never allowed to rise again.(more…)
Irrational exuberance is alive and well. Spawned by Obama’s candidature and sustained despite his recent setbacks, many people still seem to believe that all manner of foreign policy challenges can be overcome.
One of the most interesting parts of Barack Obama’s rise to power was the frenzied enthusiasm he garnered along the way. Even the mob-fearing Germans turned out in their thousands to hear him deliver unwelcome policy missives (“The Afghan people need our troops and your troops; our support and your support to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda”). At times, Obama’s presidential candidacy verged on a cult of personality.
There were a few skeptics, to be sure. But most were curmudgeonly analysts or political adversaries. Few of the change-deniers seemed, well, seemed to be quite with it. In the main, people sang “Yes We Can”, swayed to Obama’s rhetoric and believed with all their hearts.
Little more than a month after his election, the sheen has not quite come off Obama, but his administration has taken a few direct hits. Tom Daschle, a former senator, was nominated as health secretary. As with two other Obama nominees, it subsequently emerged that he had failed to pay all his taxes, and he was forced to withdraw his name from consideration. The new treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, has proved les adept at handling the economy that hoped. His first press conference saw markets tumble.
Despite these set-backs, there is no shortage of exuberance. Even hard-bitten analysts believe that in 2009-2010, world leaders can agree on a new NPT regime, establish a follow-on to the Bretton Woods systems, re-start the Doha round of multilateral trade talks and hammer our a climate deal in Copenhagen. Some even think that the entire multilateral system can be re-ordered while the US deals with NATO’s Afghan mission, Iran’s nuclear programme, Pakistan’s potential collapse, Russia’s rise, and the threat posed by a festering Middle East.
However, the truth is this agenda is probably too broad for one president, even two terms and certainly for the many stakeholders that now have to be brought into any of the global deals. The multilateral system will not be revamped, but remain a mosaic. If we are lucky, the economic crisis will be contained, but do not expect a new kind of managed globalization. George Soros has called for a eurozone government bond market, but it is hard to see European governments accepting such an overtly federalist move (which, incidentally, they rejected when the ECB was originally set up).
As to the many structural issues –- the NPT regime, climate change, the trade talks –- one or two may be solved, but certainly not all and certainly not in the next two years. Politically, trade-offs will have to be made between Iranian help in Afghanistan or an Iranian nuclear bomb. Between European unity or European energy security. Perhaps even between our economic well-being and poverty-alleviation elsewhere.
Like in the NICE decade — non-inflationary constant expansion — in which people forgot economic gravity, so people now seem to have taken leave of their foreign policy senses.
But a new world awaits. It may not look much different than the 19th century: power politics, “concert of Europe”-style diplomacy, inequality of states, spheres of influence, and interests, not values, as the driving forces behind international politics.
In an interview with the FT yesterday, Wen Jiabao sets out China’s negotiating position in the run up to the Copenhagen climate negotiation. Three main points:
Green stimulus as part of the response to the financial meltdown.
Domestic action to increase energy intensity by 4% a year (“We failed to meet the targets in the first two years of the five year period, and we succeeded in meeting the target in 2008.”)
No quantified emissions targets for China – the country is still at an early stage of development and “in terms of per capita greenhouse gas emissions, we are certainly not the biggest one.”
How strong is China’s position? Not very, I think. China is obviously right to expect the rich world to do more, but if they accept tough targets and China refuses to, then there are two consequences. 450ppm stabilization becomes impossible – and it’s the rest of the G77 that will end up with a highly inequitable deal.
The G20 London Summit in April will be Barack Obama’s first trip to Europe. The Canadians get him first (apparently this is traditional), while the Japanese (who see the G20 as an evil plot to dilute their influence) are hoping for a sneaky bilateral before the big G20 powwow.
But London will be the big one. Gordon Brown – tired of saving the world on his lonesome – will slip into the role of Robin. Obama will play Batman and kick the world back into shape. The role of Joker is yet to be cast.
But will the summit be a success? The British PM has a lot riding on it, and not just because he believes he can use the event to transform his electoral prospects. We’re in the midst of “the first financial crisis of the global age,” he says, and the best solution is try to bind all the key global issues (economy, trade, climate change, energy, development etc) into a new vision for a “global society”.
“This is not like the thirties,” Brown told a Davos audience (slightly plaintively, perhaps). “The world can come together.” But will it? And more to the point, will Obama reserve sufficient bandwidth to global coordination? Or will he be sucked into further America First policies, as the mess at home hoovers up a growing proportion of his time, energy and political capital?
The past does not dictate the present of course, but the historical precedents are not so good. The nearest equivalent to the London Summit in the thirties was World Monetary and Economic Conference, which was held in the summer of 1933.
This meeting, which bought 66 countries together in last ditch attempt to trigger global economic recovery, was derailed by a new US President – Franklin D Roosevelt – who had recently been elected in a landslide. Roosevelt rejected a compromise deal that had been hammered out by his own delegation.
The result was humiliation for a weakened British Prime Minister, and a furious reaction from the other European nations, led predictably enough by the French. The Germans, meanwhile, were left out on a limb. Hitler – just settling in as Chancellor – was forced to disown his Economic Minister mid-summit. It was an early setback for him on the international stage.
Assume a robust global deal on climate and the world’s cities will have to transform their infrastructure, economies and societies in little more than a generation.
Assume uncontrolled emissions growth and they face growing impact from a less hospitable and more volatile climate.
Either way – big changes are on the way. Few cities’ leaders grasp the scale of the challenge, especially in developing countries, where towns and cities will have an additional 1.5bn residents to cope with by 2030.
This new think piece has been prepared as part of the British Council’s Climate and Cities programme. Download the pdf (which has full references) or read the full text below the jump.
