In Copenhagenâ??s glitzy airport, thereâ??s a brightly lit billboard bearing a picture of an ageing President Obama. "Iâ??m sorry," says the legend. "We could have stopped climate change. We didnâ??t."
The advert, paid for by the international tcktcktck climate campaign was intended to galvanise people and leaders into agreeing a strong and worthwhile climate change accord in the Danish capital. Instead, it served as an uncomfortable reminder to departing delegates of the summit’s failure. However, in truth, the underlying political conditions are still not conducive to global deal-making and so the COP15 stage was never set for high drama. Farce was always likely to be top of the bill.
Inside the Bella Convention Center, the venue for the talks, one campaigner was heard to declare ‘these leaders are not representing their people’. In fact, the very problem is rather the opposite.
For while the polling evidence suggests people are on the whole not climate sceptic and generally in favour of inter-governmental action, they are manifestly less keen on economic pain and physical disruption. Talk of targets, reductions, contraction, limitation and all the green hair-shirtism has not only failed as a convincing political narrative, it has also given people to fear the impact of climate change policies.
In the teeth of such politics and in light of the failure of the UN process to yield anything of significant enough ambition and then its failure to get an unambitious accord past all 192 countries, there are important lessons to be learned.
First, national politics – despite all the talk of global solutions to global problems – still trump internationalism. By this I do not mean the vague notion of national identity nor even mercantilism, although both play a part. Rather it is straightforward national politics that have been lurking on the sidelines of the negotiation since the Bali meeting in 2007 when they began. Governments simply cannot sign an agreement they know will lead to the kind of pain and disruption the polling data shows people are averse to. At least not without a guiding political narrative at the national level; such explanation remains elusive even in countries such as the UK.
One evening in week two of COP15, I sat down to dinner next to an adviser to Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democract representing West Virginia. While the Senator is favour of action on climate change, the adviser told me, coal is intrinsic to the economy of West Virginia, which means Rockefeller will struggle to support the Kerry-Graham-Lieberman climate bill when it is put before the upper house in the US Congress next year.
For China, the implications are no less profound. Throughout the two weeks of Copenhagen, the Chinese delegation, eventually led by Premier Wen Jiabao, insisted that it would not commit to actions that would harm its economic growth or development. While global leadership is clearly of increasing importance to China – hence its participation in the accord agreed in the chill of Copenhagen – the stability of a large, diverse and disparate country depends on continued high growth. Even the usually tight-lipped Communist Party officials began to express concern at the impact of weakened global demand at the zenith of the finance crisis in 2008.
Second, no matter how many green campaigners shout and regardless of how loud their cries, climate change campaigning has failed – not through want of effort or funding – to mobilise anything other than an enthusiastic minority, and is a turn off for the majority. The dire warnings from the science and the threats to our children and our children’s children have also failed. So too has the axiomatic stitch in time arguments from the likes of Lord Stern.
Third, the world has changed. There are two global hegemons, so post-colonial, post cold war bullying has less effect. What was significant about Copenhagen was how little others really mattered. In the final hours, the US and China were left to slug it out. It was widely rumoured that the EU would move unilaterally to a 30 per cent reduction in emissions by 2020, but no-one cared. Copenhagen’s last stand was all about the language on China’s willingness to allow outside scrutiny of its climate policies.
So where to now? Read Andrew Pendleton's second part to this article: After Copenhagen: We need a new climate politics .