Saturday 25 January 2014

Climate Politics: Where Are We Now?

Addressing climate change requires international as well as local solutions, which means co-operation and negotiation on a grand scale. The scientific community has been doing this very well: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed in 1988, and has been called the largest international scientific undertaking in human history, with thousands of experts involved from around the world in the task of examining peer-reviewed technical literature and publishing the results to advise policymakers. Over the years, the language in the reports has grown stronger and stronger as the scientific consensus has grown more and more confident, to the point that the 4th report published in 2007 could state baldly that:
“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising sea levels”.
However, the policymakers' response to the ever-growing body of evidence that the climate is warming and that human activity is responsible has been essentially: “La la la, I'm not listening”
Or rather “Yes, climate change is very serious. Very serious indeed. No, I'm not going to do the slightest thing about it because that would involve requiring my people to change their behaviour and we're not going to do that till those other folks do something”.
So where are we now? Nowhere near as far down the road of cutting carbon emissions as we need to be. Indeed, you would be forgiven for thinking that negotiations on climate change have been off the boil since 2009. That was the last time I was seriously involved in climate campaigning, in advance of the 2009 Copenhagen Summit. I joined thousands of others in London to protest and demand effective action – we even chartered a train from Bradford, Leeds and Sheffield full of campaigners in blue! Unfortunately the result was fairly lacklustre, with the US and China blocking any major changes and refusing to make any concessions. The one thing that was achieved was an agreement signed by all parties that we need to restrict the rise in temperature to less than 2 degrees. It's great to have consensus, but we need to do more than talk about it! To put this in context, over the last century we have seen a rise of 0.8 degrees which has already had some fairly severe impacts. This means we only have 1.2 degrees left!
Since 2009, climate change politics have hardly received a mention in the news, so here are a few of the climate stories you might have missed:
  • In 2010, the Guardian and others spearheaded the 10:10 campaign, where people and organisations signed up to reduce their carbon emissions by 10% in 2010 as an example to others. I signed up to this, but it ran out of steam pretty quickly. However, one big achievement was the Climate Change Act in which the Government made it mandatory for the UK to achieve a carbon emissions cut of 30% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. Leeds City Council also made a similar target. The Conservative Government came to power in 2010 promising to be the 'greenest government ever' – unfortunately they didn't actually mean this and have done as little as they can get away with.
  • 2012 marked the 20th anniversary of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, but again little progress was made despite the damage caused by the weather in 2012 (floods and landslips in the UK, Hurricane Sandy in the US and a spell of hot weather and bushfires in Australia that was so severe the Australian weather service has to add two extra colours to its temperature maps).
  • In 2013, a massive typhoon hit the Philippines and many were touched and gave generously to care for the victims. The evidence continued to grow that more and more extreme weather of this kind can be expected as a result of climate change, so the president of the Philippines went to the Warsaw climate conference to demand action. The calls of developing countries such as Bangladesh, where people are still living in tents following flooding two years ago, continued to grow but frustratingly little action has arisen as a result.
And so to the future, where one thing is very clear: we cannot carry on like this. The Stern Review back in 2006 spelled out in no uncertain terms that it will cost much more to deal with the effects of climate change than to act now and create viable economies which are not based upon ever-rising consumption and energy use. And yet people still talk about the costs without realising just how expensive it will be to ignore the problem, not just in terms of money but human suffering and climate refugees (like the entire population of Bangladesh and East Anglia who are threatened by sea level rises).
In 2015 we have a general election in the UK, and a major climate conference in France. It is said that politicians just follow the way that the wind is blowing, so if we want real action, we need to create the public pressure to change the wind, through personal example, demonstrating new ways of working and living and exerting political pressure at a local and national level.  Avaaz is already pulling together campaigners from around the world to make this happen and I'm going to be part of it.
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