If the Copenhagen summit had been floated as a plot-line for EastEnders I don’t think it would have made it. To be sure it contained a circus-load of larger than life characters. People flew in and out. People shouted. Some were up and some down. Yet it lacked a clear beginning, middle and end.
The noise died away. President Obama applied himself to health care reform. What did it all mean? Let’s see.
Let’s begin with the dramatis personae. Yes, many of the world’s leading scientists were there. There was an army of journalists, a glut of NGOs and a disappointingly quiescent set of eco-warriors. These were the walk-on parts. The leading lights were the politicians, the ones that represent you and me. At the end of the day the supposed threat to humanity’s life on earth proved insufficient to be mid-wife of a binding climate deal.
Why?
The main actors were politicians so the answer must be that they were not under sufficient pressure from the folks back home to get a deal and to act. Although global warming has been kicking around as an issue for over 20 years, and its gruesome twin, irreversible climate change for a decade, most people don’t get it. I am not suggesting climate change denial (the ultimate contemporary heresy) but rather that, while most people are willing to accept the science, they don’t really believe it’s going to effect them. I can’t blame them. I accept the proposition the cream cakes will make me obese (but not really the one that I am eating).
Underlying this is a broader failure by scientists and those involved in the public policy debate. They have failed to supply meaningful measures and context to climate change. There was a ticking clock showing count down to the Olympics, why no ticking clock to show the rise in GHG’s in the atmosphere?
Most seriously of all the economic logic of fighting climate change has not been established in the public mind. A strong case can be made that it is cheaper to invest in reducing carbon use than in going on as carbon-junkies while spending on measures of mitigation. Nicholas Stern made a good start on this but the concept has not been popularised. Whatever crocodile tears may be shed about the loss of the Great Barrier Reef or the idea that the Maldives will soon be under water, the truth is that economic motivation has primacy. If people believed anti-climate change measures coincided with their economic self-interest they would be more likely to assent to the necessary measures to mitigate the change.
Those of us who remember the Thatcher era will immediately recognise the tag: “if it isn’t hurting, it isn’t working”. It was the mantra of the sado-monetarists. Am I alone in feeling that something of a sado-environmentalist tendency is apparent in the climate change debate? Many of the measures necessary to curtail climate change are not phenomenally expensive and do not require painful changes in life style, yet this seems not to be promoted while cataclysmic prophecies are propounded. It hasn’t worked.
Is there any hope? For a binding agreement between governments in the near future the answer must be “No”. The case for action will remain unanswerable. Companies, countries and individuals will act but the sum total of actions will remain too low.
An opportunity has passed. There are lessons to be learned but it will be many years before they have even the ghost of a chance of being applied through an internationally agreed and binding framework.
Peter Truesdale is an associate director at Corporate Citizenship and has wide ranging experience in public and community affairs. He joined the company in 1999 after nearly twenty years in HR and Public Affairs functions at Esso. Peter has worked with a variety of clinets from fast mvoing consumer goods companies such as Unilever, to construction cmpanies such as Laing O’Rourke. He specialises in reporting, report assurance and external standards. Peter is active in his local community and is a member of Lambeth Council. He is also a member of the Board of the London Development Agency.
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