Weighty analysis from the BBC which wonders whether what impact yesterday’s so-so weather in London will have on Gordon Brown’s premiership. You’ll want to read the whole thing of course. But for anyone who has more pressing worries, the answer is… none at all.
“In the last 43 years, only Mr Heath and Mr Blair have had good weather to usher them into power. Mr Brown’s dull start is not, it seems, unusual.”
What a relief.
There was a paradox at the heart of this week’s conference on climate change.
When describing the scale of the problem, speakers gave very strong messages. Temperature changes need to be kept below 2 degrees. This means keeping greenhouse gases below 450ppm (CO2 equivalent) – and even this might be too high. Emissions need to peak in the next few years and fall dramatically by 2050.
But when the time came to talk about how to respond to this challenge, speakers were much more cautious. No-one knows what kind of deal will prove politically possible.
Even governments who favour radical action seem reluctant to go on the record about what needs to be done. There is a marked contrast between their anodyne public messages and what they’re prepared to say behind closed doors.
This has to be wrong.
The Stern Review showed the advantages of doing your thinking out in the open. Instead of commissioning an internal review, the British government used a high profile piece of research to help change the terms of the global debate.
Surely, the same approach should be taken as governments sidle towards negotiating a post-Kyoto climate agreement. (more…)
Over the last couple of days, we’ve been blogging from the Chatham House conference – Climate Change: Politics versus Economics.
As the conference made clear, there is growing consensus about what a full-term solution to climate change would look like: concentrations kept below 450ppm or even a shade lower.
This target allows some fairly easy sums to be done. How much can we emit to keep below those limits? When will emissions need to peak? How far will they need to decline from this peak?
IPCC answers for these questions are a peak by 2015, with a decline of as much as 85% by 2050.
Add to that a professed commitment by leaders to get a deal on a post 2012 framework in place by 2009 – and you have a clear and demanding ‘signal from the future’.
That matters. It allows politicians to begin to understand the deal they will be required to make. It helps them build the alliances at home that will give them credibility on the world stage.
It also gives them an idea of the how much climate change is likely to happen – what level of risk they need to prepare for, how much resilience will be needed against future changes.
This is particularly important for developing countries. I firmly expect them to play a much bigger role in the climate change debate over the next year or so.
At the moment, the strongest voices on climate change (Merkel, for example) come from the developed world. More recently, the big emerging economies have become increasingly influential voices.
There is a line that says that that extends the circle far enough – 30 or so emitters make up 90% or so of global emissions. Why bother with countries that emit less than 1% of the world’s total?
The answer is that developing countries are important not because of their emissions, but because of they will bear the brunt of unchecked climate change.
Take people who already experience unforgiving climactic conditions and who have so few reserves that they live their lives on a knife edge. Add extra stress. The likely consequences are obvious…
That’s why I think we’ll soon see the emergence of new voices from the developing world, able to talk with real authority about why the big emitters need to act swiftly to curb their emissions. (more…)
That was a pretty good conference. But here are five leftfield suggestions for how to make conferences even more fun – and get the speakers to perform. (Most of these ideas – oh, OK, all of them – are David’s; but hey, what’s blogging if not glorified plagiarism?)
In his closing key note speech at Chatham House, Malik Amin Aslam Khan, Pakistan’s environment minister, argued that ‘we are fast running out of time for remedial action’ on the ‘indisputable’ threat from climate change.
While the science becomes clearer, the economic warnings unmistakable, the physical reality unambiguous and world opinion strongly in support, the politics on the issue, unfortunately, lags indecisively behind.
All the above influences seem to be strong drivers for shifting political paradigm but they are still not enough to untangle the complex web of global politics caught up in the UN system in unending discussions on the post-Kyoto climate regime.
He welcomed recent agreement of a 2009 deadline for reaching an agreement and the IPCC signal of the need for a $100/ton price of carbon.
But, he wondered, will a future agreement provide developing countries with a fair deal.
“The time may be right to give serious political thought to the principle of ‘equal per capita entitlements’,” he argued. “The basic ethical foundations belying this approach – every human being should be entitled to equal emission rights – has a very strong defining power which is likely to shape long term global principles.”