His argument is one that will be familiar to regular readers of politicalclimate.net: Countries have made their best offers in the annexes to the Copenhagen Accord and are unlikely to revise upwards until political and economic conditions change. As we pointed out over on the Open Democracy website prior to Copenhagen, targets do not inexorably lead to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (although if there’s a process like the UK’s Climate Change Committee in place, they certainly help).

‘What matters, however, is not a new UN treaty annex full of “targets” – but actual policies, plans, programmes, measures, actions and national impetus to stop the growth of emissions.’

So, while it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have frequent reminders of the potential consequences of delivery against inadequate targets – although even that looks a tall order at the moment – it’s not likely to be a game changer. By that token, there must be better ways to use valuable time and resources than continually reinventing the same intractable targets debate or producing further analysis to show how inadequate the Copenhagen Accord targets are.

Instead, why not focus on ‘actual policies, plans, programmes, measures, actions and national impetus’. Winning the high and low politics means demonstrating that a country, region, city or community can decouple its prosperity and people’s quality of life from emissions growth. Citizens need to see the benefits of low carbon; governments need to be more confident that the green arrows don’t only point to the exit.

From memory, MPH persuaded its supporters in the UK to take more than 9 million separate actions (please correct us if our memory is errant) in the run up to Gleneagles G8 summit in 2005. These included sending postcards and text messages to leaders, signing petitions and taking part in a succession of campaigning events and protests.

Whether or not this huge amount of activity ultimately achieved its ends is a question for another day. The MPH evaluation is here, in case you’re interested. But attempts by campaigning groups focussing on climate change to recreate MPH’s level of fervour – notably in the UK through the Stop Climate Chaos (SCC) campaign – have fallen short of the mark and have tended only to engage the ‘green wedge’ who were already engaged anyway.

We’ve been involved in or closely observed both MPH and climate campaigns and we think there are two principal reasons why an MPH for climate has proven elusive.

First, climate change is a very different issue. One of the most oft quoted stastitics during MPH was that a child in the developing world dies every three seconds as a result of extreme poverty. The evidence base for this number was a matter of some dispute, but it stuck. By contrast, the world of climate campaigning is a miasma of numbers: 450 or 350ppm, 2 degrees, 50 per cent, 80 per cent etc.  These sometimes get related to terrible things that might happen in the future, but this doesn’t seem to have the same impact on the public.

One international development agency, Christian Aid, did try to put a human face to climate impacts, but in its associated asks (turn the lights off at the office, turn the thermostat down etc) this campaign seemed to suffer from the second reason why jumping from climate campaigning to MPH is difficult. The solutions to climate change are complex, costly and will have a direct impact on the lives of those whom campaign groups need to engage to be successful – i.e. the public in the rich world. The links between the actions of individuals or the setting by governments of targets for emissions reductions and climate impacts, such as the floods in Pakistan, are obscure, especially in comparison with the links between increasing aid or cutting debts and poverty reduction (even if in reality one does not necessarily beget the other). Plus successful UK action on climate change will directly reduce the household welfare of campaigners.

Of course, there are lots of other reasons why climate campaigning and MPH are different. For instance, MPH emerged from the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which meant development campaign groups had experience of working together; the environmental campaigning sector is apparently less cohesive.

There was also a lot of celebrity muscle behind MPH. Celebrities have been a lot less forthcoming in support of climate campaigns, perhaps because of fears of being caught out driving their Range Rover Sports to the supermarket.

For all the reasons we frequently highlight on this blog, politicians desperately need people’s consent in order to take action on climate change; it simply isn’t an issue on which either a narrow, green wedge of activism or bold leadership can take us as far as is necessary; we’ll simply fail more slowly. So what are the lessons from MPH that are helpful?

The axioms of popular campaigning usually require there to be a clear victim, a clear villain and a clear solution. We might need to tamper with these for successful climate campaigning. Apparently future generations are too distant as victim and government-set emissions caps and lifestyle changes are not cohesive and appealing enough as solutions. However, the biggest problem is that, much as we can point the finger at big oil, or lambast weak political leadership, climate change is a bugger of a campaign issue because the utlimate villain is…..us.

With three parliamentary seats left to fill with certainty, the results to date suggest a vote evenly split between the less climate friendly Coalition and the more climate friendly Australian Labor Party (ALP). The Greens have picked up only one seat and there are likely to be four independents, three of whom it seems will assume a king- or queen-maker role.

Prior to the election, pollsters seemed to agree that the ALP’s capitulation on climate change was likely to cost it support and that the Greens would be the major beneficiaries. However, while the Greens’ share of the vote has increased to 11.4 per cent (at the time of writing), it appears to be likely to fall short of a predicted 14 per cent. The party’s one seat will not hand it the balance of power. And the key independents, while progressive on climate change, have hardly foregrounded it as an issue in the list of demands submitted to the leaders of the ALP and the Coalition.

George Monbiot’s thoughtful piece on how climate change is still resolutely a left-right issue – in Australia and in the US – disappointingly falls back on the same old green explanation. He concludes by writing:

‘Yes, man-made climate change denial is about politics, but it’s more pragmatic than ideological. The politics have been shaped around the demands of industrial lobby groups, which happen, in many cases, to fund those who articulate them.’

For sure, both denialism and industry lobbying are important factors, but they too easily explain what is probably a highly seasoned and more complex hegemonic cauldron.

For instance, take a look at this Newspoll/The Australian ranking of issues that Australian voters said were important in the run up to the election (click on the ‘importance and best party to handle major issues’ link). In the two years since July 2008, climate change fell in importance by more than ten percentage points and at 23-25 July 2010 (i.e. immediately prior to the election) was ranked only eighth, with healthcare, education, the economy and other usual suspect issues taking the top slots.

This could all be part of a fiendish plot by industry, whose capture of the media and politics subtly commands the views of voters. However, it could also be that even in Australia, where severe drought and staggeringly destructive bush fires have offered a prescient glimpse of a world under a changed climate, voters still put more immediate interests first.

So can the three independents change the climate of politics in Australia. ippr’s friends at The Climate Institute think they can. However, as a leader in The Australian seeks to remind them:

‘… as they say in the southern United States, the independents should dance with the one who brung them. They will be held responsible for the choice they are about to make between Labor and the Coalition and could find themselves out of a job in three years, or sooner, if their constituents disagree.’

In other words, electoral politics are the ones that in the end matter to politicians. If on climate change the electorate does not speak or does not speak unequivocally, then it’s hard to see how politicians can respond with the kind of vigour required of them.

Some of course blame it’s very lameness and the Democrat leadership’s unwillingness to push hard on the issue of climate itself. Others are dancing on the bill’s grave, arguing that putting cap and trade at its heart was a fatal flaw. And a further phalanx of pro-climate action views direct their anger at the ‘moral cowards‘ defending ‘narrow electoral interests’ in the Senate.The cap element of the bill died long ago. Cautious Senators with pressing electoral interests – such as not being seen to vote for increasing energy costs ahead of November elections – and no doubt significant palm-greasing by corporate interest groups made economy- or even energy utility-wide measures almost impossible. Sadly, cap and trade has taken a renewable energy standard down with it.

The key problem with cap and trade is not policy design but politics. The EU ETS is working well as a carbon market, but because all of its flaws require some tough politicking to correct, it is not as yet significantly serving its primary policy goal of reducing emissions. The more it does serve these interests, the less popular it will be. How much additional cost consumers will shoulder before it is too much is a question as yet without an answer. But putting costs to the fore and deferring benefits is unlikely to prove popular and doing so for climate reasons is, as we’ve argued here before, likely to prove unpopular.

There may well now be a serious rift opening up in the hitherto mostly united climate change movement. With a US bill still elusive and after the underwhelming outcome of the Copenhagen climate summit, many want a back to basics debate focussed on the science, the severity of impacts and urgency. Tom Freidman in the New York Times typifies this approach with a quasi-religious pitch that suggests we will all face a climate judgement day. Alex Evans in a recent ippr debate pursues a similar line of argument, urging Noah-like preparedness.

To broaden and deepen the appeal of policy that’s designed to have climate benefits, there is in our view a need to change the messenger and the message. The environmental movement that brought us Copenhagen and the US Senate bill has a very significant green wedge of support and has demonstrably influenced many leaders. But beyond the offices of the campaign groups and the corridors of power, green lifestyles are not vote-winners and doom-laden climate message is quickly lost in the miasma of ordinary people’s lives.

The ‘cowardly’ Senators who failed to indicate support for the US bill are probably acutely aware of this conundrum. It’s time for the rest of us to wake up to it.

In partnership with Christian Aid and WWF-UK and with technical assistance from Cisco Systems, ippr - Political Climate’s parent organisation – has been grappling with the politics of climate change (rather than climate change policy). The final event in a series of five focuses on creating political space for more ambitious action on climate change. We hope this post – which is our interpretation of what we’ve heard so far – is interesting in its own right, but we also hope it will help get the debate going for those attending.

What have we learnt from the series, which has looked so far at the UNFCCC process and the politics in China, the US and the EU? There are perhaps four important lessons…

Lesson One: The UN negotiations cannot be the only game in town.

The process of treaty negotiation is still seemingly in the grip of post-Copenhagen paralysis. But there is much talk of how global climate strategy has to be built from the bottom up. In our first debate, Professor Steve Rayner of Oxford University’s Institute for Science, Innovation and Society argued elloquently that without robust national action focussed on investment in technology, it would be impossible to move forward internationally.

The bottom-up approach need not be pursued to the exclusion of the UNFCCC process. But it would seem that pressing for an international agreement before the political conditions in key countries have improved is no more likely to be successful now than it was at Copenhagen.

Lesson Two: China’s leadership is reliant on high economic growth rates.

Decision making in China is a lengthy process and so conventional summit diplomacy, in which leader peer pressure is presumed to raise the stakes, does not work. Also – unsurprisingly – growth and not environmental protection is the number one priority and so China is only likely to consider the latter where it either impedes or assists the former. So more ambitious action on climate change is likely to come from attempts to deal with other forms of more visceral environmental pollution or because climate-friendly technologies spur growth.

Lesson Three: The US needs a ‘plan b’ in case the Senate bill fails.

While it’s too early to give up on a Senate bill on energy (with perhaps some climate elements), the chances of failure are still high. Michael Schellenberger of The Breakthrough Institute argued that in order to stave off competition from China, the US needs to invest in technological innovation and that an investment-led approach funded using a modest carbon tax would be a good ‘plan b’.

Lesson Four: The EU needs to get its act together.

Economic crisis in Europe and its perceived loss of leadership during the Copenhagen meeting has forced the EU onto the back foot on climate change. But even prior to Copenhagen, the issue was not resolved inside Europe. We heard from Kzrysztof Bobinski how Poland’s leaders are largely uninterested in climate change as an issue in itself and how climate may only resonate in Warsaw if it becomes synonymous with energy independence from Russia. An EU-wide political strategy on climate change to galvanise the union into more effective leadership needs to have such thinking at its heart.

The Way Forward

Those of us who work on climate change have been guilty of focussing too much on inter-governmental politics rather than understanding the politics of climate change at the national level. While most people in most countries are far from being deniers, they are equally unready to suffer (any more) economic pain for the climate’s sake. And so governments in key countries lack a mandate for the kinds of swingeing policies necessary.

How can that be changed?

Keep calm and carry on: Alex Evans argued in our US debate that the impacts of climate change would ultimately be the driver of more ambitious action and that, like Churchill in the wilderness, we should ensure we’re politically prepared and in the meantime resist appeasement in the form of political realists.

Don’t mention the climate: Research conducted last year by ippr points to a reframing of the climate issue. The evidence from this and other polls suggests that people are strongly in favour of renewable energy, but less willing to bear the costs of a shift in energy technology, especially if the reason for doing so is to stop climate change.

Fight a different set of battles: Steve Rayner and Michael Schellenberger are both authors of the Hartwell Paper and both support the prioritisation of a different set of policies in order to address the politics. For instance, they argue that a focus on investment in clean technology rather than on taxing emissions will stimulate more support for policy.

Swords into shares of the atmosphere: Rather than reframing the debate or changing the focus of climate policy to fit where people are now, some, such as Tom Crompton, argue that we need to engage with people’s (consumerist) values and shape them for better environmental and social outcomes.

We mention these approaches not because they are an exhaustive list but because they epitomise where the debate on climate politics currently rests. They are clearly not mutually exclusive; in an ideal world we would pursue all of the above and more concurrently. But with limited time and resources, what should be our focus? Let the discussion commence!

The plant (the above picture is its construction site) has been named ‘Medupi’ by state-owned Eskom. This apparently means ‘rain that soaks parched lands’ – perhaps unfortunate given the climate impacts of coal. At 4,788 MW of installed generating capacity, Medupi will be an absolute monster; reportedly the fourth largest coal plant in the world.

Medupi is especially controversial, though, because it has been awarded concessional finance – a loan of $3.75 billion from the World Bank. Thus northern taxpayers are subsidising the construction of a large point source of carbon emissions (although part of this loan is said by the Bank to be for renewables).

To add insult to the injurious feelings of those who campaigned hard against the World Bank loan, it seems Eskom may be able to claim Clean Development Mechanism carbon credits for the plant. Medupi will use supercritical technology and the CDM board has approved a methodology for higher efficiency fossil fuel plants (i.e. for claiming credits against a baseline of less efficient technology – in this case subcritical coal). Campaigners are understandably outraged.

The World Bank’s defence of its loan, which presumably enables the project to proceed, or at least to do so at lower cost to the South African taxpayer, is less than 100 per cent convincing and throws up few surprises. South Africa, the Bank argues, has increased grid coverage massively in recent years but without increasing baseload. Medupi will help stabilise supply and meet demand and therefore it will benefit poor households. Notwithstanding the concerns in some quarters, about the structure of tariffs in South Africa, these are the same arguments the Bank has used for decades to justify involvement in large scale power plants and, carbon emissions aside, the opposition sounds similar too.

When the loan was voted on by the World Bank’s board, the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Italy and Norway all apparently abstained, registering disapproval while not preventing approval. The US government spoke out against the Bank’s involvement, but political rhetoric was not in the end backed up by actions.

The tale of Eskom’s mighty new coal plant, it’s subsidised loans and putative carbon credits merely illustrates how very far away our collective actions are from our rhetoric on climate change. Eskom could invest differently, but it is not in its commercial interests to do so; the World Bank’s main investors could more robustly re-purpose its energy finance but as yet they have not; the CDM board could have refused to approve a fossil fuel efficiency methodology (and have saved itself from ridicule), but it didn’t. At each step there is political as well as policy failure.

Underscoring the whole debate is the inexorable quest for development. There may be very good micro arguments as to why Medupi is not a pro-poor power plant, but it is hard to argue against the logic at the national energy strategy level in countries such as South Africa that demands cheap, coal-fired power.

Medupi is certain to be opposed every step of the way by campaigners – and not just those with climate change in mind. But if we are to avoid future Medupi’s, three things have to change.

Development Bank-style lending needs to be focussed on helping to bring down the cost of capital for and injecting confidence into renewables sectors. The argument at the World Bank needs to be won so that the subsidy is switched to low carbon energy technologies. But debates over the Bank’s financing of energy projects are currently too polluted by calls for the institution to play no part at all in climate-related investments. A cleaned up Bank with its fingers in the climate pie would surely be better than a dirty Bank without. The next step on this is a smart political strategy to influence the Bank as it reinvents its approach to energy financing.

Second, campaigners must wholly embrace the low-carbon innovation challenge. As we have argued in previous posts, hard-headed economic decisions will favour conventional technologies until innovation brings down the cost of new technology. So it really isn’t just a straightforward battle on the rain soaked parched lands of the Limpopo valley between clean and dirty technology as under the current rules of engagement, low carbon is likely to lose.

Thus, in the context of coal, pushing hard for early demonstration of CCS at the kind of scale demanded by Medupi is the logical step beyond simply saying no to unabated coal. More broadly we need to develop and advocate for national and international (regional or bilateral rather than global) innovation policies that widen rather than narrow our technological choices in the future.

Third, there needs to be a clear story to explain and guide policymaking. Arguing against projects like Medupi on climate grounds alone is demonstrably not enough. We need to construct a narrative that is closer to people’s immediate wellbeing to explain why low-carbon technology is necessary, especially for poor people in countries such as South Africa.

Per Meilstrup, a Danish journalist, has written a whole book on COP 15 – largely the source of the Guardian piece – and reveals the ‘real’ Danish text on his blog.

Mistakes were clearly made – by the Danes and the UNFCCC’s secretariat – but the key question that the climate coroners need to ask is arguably this one: Had Lars Lokke Rasmussen not botched the high-level diplomacy, would Copenhagen have concluded with a more substantive outcome? The answer is almost certainly still no.

Why? The reasons are fundamentally to do with politics at the national level, which is where the politics mostly are. China and the US had already made announcements before Copenhagen and because of their respective domestic decision making processes, neither were in a position to increase their offers. So the conventional logic of diplomacy – that governments always arrive at summits with something extra tucked in their back pockets – did not hold.

Had events played out differently, the EU might have enjoyed its 30 per cent moment, but as the recent London Times debacle has illustrated, the debate among member states is by no means settled. While waiting in one of Copenhagen’s many queues, I chatted to an adviser to one European government’s finance minister who told me the Poles had only consented to 30 per cent in principle and on the understanding that Poland incurred no additional cost. How would that work?

It’s a real shame de Boer’s legacy is Copenhagen. Few people can have worked harder for a climate treaty. But the Danish lesson is not so much one of diplomatic failure. The leaders that matter have no mandate to agree a new climate treaty.

Behind both of these decisions is a complex set of national, political circumstances. In the case of the US it’s clear that Democrats have spotted electoral gain in forcing the Republicans’ hand on immigration and also significant risk in not doing so. As a result, climate and energy may have to wait; the political cost being the probable loss of the support of Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.

The case of Australia is perhaps more complex still but also all about the politics.

Underscoring both cases is a profound problem for advocates of climate change policy. Moves to address climate change are rarely top of the list of political priorities among those in favour and vociferously opposed by those against. ippr’s UK Climate of Opinion poll underlines this point with perfect clarity. Matthew’s recent post contains its results for the first part of the argument and sometime soon we’ll find time to dig out the data that shows how, on the other side of the equation, opposition is firmly entrenched.

The gradual shelving of classical climate policy is not fun to watch, but for the above reasons (and for others, such as the hugely turbulent love affair climate advocates have had with pricing carbon) nor is it surprising. The science and economics of climate change may provide an analytical basis for action, but they are not the source of an inspiring political narrative and are thus finding their way onto the shelf rather than into the statute book.

There is no other country quite like India. As the World Bank’s country overview shows, while poverty rates have been reduced in the past two decades, more than one quarter of the rural and urban population remain poor in absolute terms.

The other big story at the macro level in India is inequality. In the same World Bank data set, it is noted that the country’s richest states have average incomes five times higher than its poorest states. Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh (known pejoratively as BIMARU) have human and economic development data more akin to least developed countries than to one of the world’s major economies.

As noted elsewhere on this blog, decarbonisation is primarily an energy challenge. In India, 400 million people regularly lose power in outages and less than half (44 per cent) of rural households have access to electricity. A very good Wikipedia page has all the relevant data and links. India’s political economy is thus much about energy; the challenge, which is of importance to the current government whose mandate comes particularly from rural voters, is to ensure that its rural poor have access to electricity (or at least that the job is in hand).

According to Dr. Ritu Mathur at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), who sits on the 26-member expert group advising India’s Planning Commission, India must expand electricity generation from its current installed capacity of less than 150GW to around 800GW by 2030. TERI’s recent submission to the Indian PM on energy security (apparently not available online) is well worth tracking down. This and other recent work on energy supply and security in India pose a mighty elephant of a question: Is it possible for India to find the energy it requires from conventional, fossil sources?

TERI’s answer to this question is an effective ‘no’. Its submission to the PM suggests that under a business as usual scenario, by 2031/32, India would be almost 80 per cent reliant on imports of fossil fuels. Alternatively, the report argues, under a highly ambitious renewable energy-based scenario (which would also reduce India’s per capita carbon emissions to 1.24 tonnes), India could constrain its fossil fuel import dependency to around 30 per cent. However, this scenario is around two-thirds reliant on solar power.

TERI has used the MARKAL model to crunch its scenarios. The credibility of this model notwithstanding, it would be fair to say we simply cannot fully know the impact that such a huge demand for fossil fuels (especially when multiplied several times due to equivalent demand growth elsewhere in Asia and perhaps also in Africa and Latin-America) would have on world prices. Equally at current costs, such an immense amount of solar in India’s energy mix would take domestic energy prices way beyond the reach of the very people the expansion of supply is intended to serve. The national and geo-politics of this are mind-boggling.

PM Singh recently launched India’s solar mission, which has a not-to-be-sniffed-at ambition to install 20GW of solar power by 2022; equivalent to more than one-quarter of the entire installed electricity generating capacity of the UK. For understandable energy security reasons and to reach the places the grid will not reach, India is already going for solar in a big way. However, India’s electricity production cost, also according to TERI (2007), is between 2 and 6 Rupees per unit and solar electricity’s unit costs are between 15 and 30 Rupees. The Government estimates the solar mission will cost $19 billion (India solar geeks should check this Wikipedia page).

Climate negotiations tend to focus on whether countries such as India (and to reiterate, apart from India, there is no country such as India) can be persuaded to take on some form of quasi-binding emissions limitation target. Political Climate’s view – especially after our few days in Delhi – is that it would be far better to engage in a technology-specific negotiation. With 300 clear sunny days per calendar year, solar is the obvious priority (although there would and should be others). So the key India question is; what can international cooperation achieve in dramatically reducing the unit cost of electricity from solar?

Until the climate negotiations or other global processes focus in on the aspects of the debate that really matter to the political economy of major emitters (and those with the potential to become so, which is how India would see itself) countries ‘such as India’ are unlikely to be moved. Why would they be?

In some respects BASIC is an evolutionary beast whose ancestors were the G90 and G20 that mated during the Doha round of World Trade Organisation talks and ultimately brought them to a grinding hault. Like the ‘G110′, as it became known during the WTO’s 2005 ministerial meeting in Hong Kong, BASIC is also a blocking constituency. However, it differs from the G110 in the rather obvious respect of being a much smaller group of large, developing world economies and is also Sino-centric; the G110 was not.

For now, the answer to the first part of the question appears to be ‘yes’. BASIC most manifestly benefits China because it lends cover to a Chinese government as yet unready for the role of global hegemon. Traditionally, the relationship between China and India has always been cast as one of rivalry. However – perhaps triggered by the BASIC grouping – there appears to be a new mood of cooperation between Asia’s two big beasts.

The answer to the second part of the question is linked to whether or not BASIC has ambitions to become more than a blocker. If so, then interests may not be so easy to align and the very different social, cultural, political and economic conditions of India and China may not make for such a positive alliance.

One further question asked by some in Delhi is what in fact are India’s interests in global climate negotiations? India has hitherto been very adept at articulating what it doesn’t want and at gaming within the UNFCCC and it is along these lines that BASIC works. But if the Delhi government – led in negotiations by Jairam Ramesh (pictured) – has a vision of an agreement or at least more cooperation to help bring about some of its existing ambitions on energy efficiency and renewable energy – and it’s not clear that it currently does – then will BASIC help or hinder India in its pursuit of this vision?