About

Political Climate is a blog aimed at people who want to discuss a new response to climate change.

Its lead authors have spent many years working on climate change and international development policy and are of the view that both the climate science-led environmentalist movement and the definition and diagnosis of climate change as an economic problem have failed. Despite dominating the debate to date, neither of these approaches have properly engaged with the fundamental climate paradox - that for the majority of people in the important emitting countries both North and South, priority concerns are immediate, while the climate crisis is distant.

The Copenhagen summit of 2009 in our view marks the death of the Kyoto Protocol-style approach, prioritising long term emissions targets and attempts to set a price for carbon emissions. It is impossible to imagine more resources and more concerted campaigning focused on one international meeting, and yet leaders ultimately could not and did not move faster than their national politics allowed.

A significant part of the problem is that, because people are more concerned about their immediate well-being than climate change, the approach of increasing the price of energy systems into which we are all currently locked is fundamentally unattractive. Instead, we think the focus should be on making alternatives cheaper by triggering an innovation revolution capable of meeting the climate challenge.

This will have to be led by governments, and paid for with a combination of public borrowing and the re-direction of private finance capital. The aim of Political Climate is to begin a discussion about how this can be done. We also want to contribute to a more politically realistic climate change debate that takes as its starting point the need for a new political economy.