I have been reading Michael Sandel’s recent book, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? Sandel is currently hot property on the centre left in the UK. He gave the prestigious Reith Lectures in 2009, and his argument for a ‘politics of the common good’ has hit a chord amongst politicians like Ed Miliband.

At the heart of Sandel’s philosophy is the rejection of two foundations for politics – utilitarianism (do the thing that produces the maximum happiness) and liberalism (do the thing that allows people to do what they want). Sandell argues that instead, politics should be  moral in nature (building on the principle of Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’) and that they should be about the ultimate purpose of institutions (building on Aristotle).

Here I am interested particularly in the implications of a Kantian perspective. Kant says that politics should be built on moral arguments. We should do things because they are right, according to rules that are consistent when applied to everyone, and built on a notion of human dignity and rationality. Equally, we should not do things that are morally wrong. Crucially, this means that what matters is not outcomes (i.e. happiness or freedom), but motives.

What does this approach say about the politics of climate change? First of all, a moral foundation may be helpful simply because the alternatives are problematic. The utilitarian case for tackling climate change (for example, the Stern Review’s argument that it will cost us less to do something than to do nothing) is weakened in practice by the fact that the costs of doing something need to be borne today and in the North, whereas the benefits will be largest in the future and in the South.

If the utilitarian argument for climate action is weak in practice, the liberal argument is positively unhelpful, since positive freedoms (I should be allowed to drive my car whenever I like) always tend in practice to drown out negative freedoms (I should be allowed to live free from the threat of flooding, drought etc).

However, the moral basis for action on climate change is not without its complications. This is partly because when we emit carbon, we are not doing something wrong in Kant’s terms. Our motive is not to harm others. Even Jeremy Clarkson is not suggesting you drive a large, fast car for the express purposes of damaging humanity – he is a classic libertarian and just wants to have his idea of fun. So there is a problem with an environmentalism (or humanism) that says our current actions are morally wrong – probably one reason why people tend to react strongly against such suggestions.

On the other hand, wanting to cut your emissions because it is the right thing to do (as opposed to feeling good about yourself, or even because it will benefit others) is a consistent moral position. So why don’t more people do it? Why, for example, don’t more people give up eating meat, which would cut emissions but requires no major action by governments? When Nick Stern suggested this last year he was ridiculed.

This is where Sandel’s political argument comes in. He is saying that politics (especially Democratic politics in the US and by extension New Labour politics here) has in the past relied too much on utilitarian or liberal arguments. The Left needs to learn from the Right, which since the 1970s has grounded politics in morality (it is interesting that there are even some on the Right who urge climate action on moral grounds, usually expressed in terms of religious morality). Politicians who believe in tackling climate change need to start speaking up for doing the right thing.

This is an interesting and appealling argument. However, it faces the major challenge, especially in the US but even to some extent in the UK, of the growth of a libertarian populism – the emergence of what Mark Lilla calls anti-political Jacobins, who distrust not only governments but all public institutions and intellectuals like Stern, while believing firmly in themselves. If Lilla is right, the essential problem for politicians (or environmental leaders) seeking to make a moral argument for cutting emissions is getting a hearing in the first place.

“Current levels of public expenditure for RD&D [research, development  and deployment] should be regarded as a minimum and cuts would be detrimental to the achievement of our climate goals and the new Government’s objective to build a green economy. UK energy RD&D funding is low by international standards, and international funding is low relative to benchmarks proposed by the Stern Review, the IEA and the EU (e.g. IEA analysis suggests that a two to fivefold increase is required).”

The CCC estimates that current spending on low carbon RD&D in the UK is around £550 million, including spending by higher education research councils. this is a tiny amount in the context of this year’s deficit of over £150 billion.  But more importantly it is the kind of investment in our future economy and environment that should be the last thing to go.

Sad then, that the CCC report came out three days after the cuts we outlined in Monday’s post.

Support to low carbon innovation is pretty small beer compared with the size of the deficit, but crucial not only to a deep cut in emissions, but also to the sustainable recovery we will need to deal with that deficit (the idea of cutting our way through it is not only bad economics but also a political fantasy). By comparison with potential competitors like South Korea, it looks as if we are sawing off the branch we are sitting on.

Is there evidence to support these ideas? As a first cut, we looked at Eurobarometer and Eurostat data on the EU 27 countries about attitudes to climate change (% saying it is a very serious issue), willingness to pay more for alternative energy, a measure of inequality (ratio of income in top two deciles to income in bottom two deciles) and a measure of economic security (spend per head on social protection).

It turns out that the relationship between inequality and security on the one hand and attitudes to climate change on the other are not strong. As the first two following figures show, there appears to be no relationship between the percentage saying climate is a very serious issue and the inequality measure, and only a loose one with the security indicator.

However, the picture with the percentage willing to pay more for alternative energy is very different. This measure is quite strongly related to inequality – the more unequal the income distribution, the smaller the proportion willing to pay more.

Similarly, the greater the spend on social protection, the higher the willingness to pay more for alternative energy.

One thing these data suggest are that the usual opinion polls asking people how they feel about climate change are not a good test of how they feel about real policies.

Of course, correlation and causation are not the same thing, and one can easily tell a story here about underlying sets of values that determine both variables (which in a way, is the point). Nevertheless, interesting and suggestive stuff…

Alex starts by bemoaning the fact that an increasingly widespread response to the failure at Copenhagen is to argue that legally-binding international agreement with environmentally effective targets, along with global carbon markets, is currently impossible, and instead we should be trying to support national policies, like expanding renewable energy and driving through energy efficiency measures.

He then lays into Shellenberger for proposing an aspirational framing of climate policy in place of the more traditional environmentalist frame of limits. Alex has no time for this kind of talk:

“So enough with all the doom and gloom. Focus on the possibilities! The new jobs! The gadgets! Green new deal! All must win prizes! Well, I hate to be the party pooper, but – seriously? Are we all really drinking this Kool-aid?”

His dismissal of the so-called “bottom up” approach to policy, and a framing that appeals to the positive side of human nature, is based on two main points.

First, bottom up, voluntary actions won’t get us to where we need to be. No government in the OECD can afford to subsidise new low carbon technologies. In the end, decarbonisation costs money, and we can’t do it without carbon pricing.

Second, the Green New Deal story is unconvincing, and those who lose their jobs in the high carbon economy will mobilise more effectively to block change than those who might get new jobs in clean energy.

His alternative proposal is an international agreement for “equal per capita shares to the atmosphere” based on climate science – i.e. Contraction and Convergence. The idealistic nature of this position is for Alex its strength, because he is playing the long game. As he puts it: “rather than realistic…I think the key thing at this stage is to be ready.”

What he thinks we need to be ready for turns out to be climate impacts, which have the Cinderella quality that they are “tough enough to frighten people badly, but not so bad as to overshoot irreversible tipping points”. A kind of Lehmann Brothers moment, or rather, a Poland moment, since Alex goes on make much of the contrast between Neville Chamberlain’s realism in the face of Hitler and Churchill’s years in the wilderness, preparing for a war that only he knew was inevitable, and the sacrifices that would be needed to fight that war: “What Churchill understood, one suspects, it seems to be in the nature of our species that we don’t get to ‘broad sunlit uplands’ without first going through a battle.”

At the end, Alex spells out the bottom line: “I think we’re kidding ourselves if we think that we can get through this without facing up to the need for principles on how we share out access to a world of finite resources, or the fact that this will involve sacrifice from those of us in the rich world.”

This is powerful, if morally loaded rhetoric, portraying Evans as the hero and Michael Shellenberger as an appeaser. But I am not convinced, for reasons arising from the fact that both the future – whether political or climate – is fundamentally unknowable.

Shellenberger says that a narrative based on limits and sacrifice will never work politically, and that we should invest heavily in technology because it may provide a solution that will be environmentally effective in the end. It has to be said that the evidence is with him on the first point, so far.

Alex says that there is no guarantee that the technology will work without targets and carbon pricing, and that we should prepare for the inevitable climate shock by investing in a politics of limits and sacrifice and a plan to go with it. I have some quibbles with Alex on the affordability of low carbon technology (it’s actually happening through higher energy bills, not higher public spending) and the distinction between carbon pricing and technology policy (read Chapter 16 of the Stern Review), but the main weakness of his argument lies in the second part.

There is simply no reason to believe that a climate shock big enough to bring about major changes in thinking will come along before we reach a tipping point (how would we know?). Climate change is by its nature long-term and insidious, more like a frog in a warming pot than a sudden Anschluss. And we have already had Hurricane Katrina, which demonstrated two things: first, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to authoritatively attribute single weather events to climate change, and second, that in such events, attention is immediately focused on what they show about the societies in which they happen.

In the case of Katrina, the story was not about what terrible things would happen with a changing climate, but about how the deep racial and class divisions in American society were laid bare, and the hopelessly inadequate response by the Bush regime. This indeed is the problem – most people are more interested in other people than they are in nature.

We have already had a generation of climate impacts. They will certainly get worse, and of course eventually they will impinge on the public mind that they do become a clear and present danger. But there is absolutely no reason to think that this will happen in the time frame that some action is needed. Bottom-up action may not get us there – that’s a real risk. But waiting for the flood is an even bigger one.

A post from guest blogger Reg Platt

As regular readers will know Political Climate thinks the focus of climate policy should be on innovation to reduce the cost of low-carbon technology rather than on forcing up the cost of carbon intensive energy. But, innovation is not straightforward and more money does not necessarily mean the right results. This is lesson coming out of two recent events I attended, the first a Green Mondays event on ‘disruptive’ innovation and the second a speech by Sir Harold Evans at the RSA on The Spirit of Innovation.

Three points stand out.

First, what sort of innovation? Is incremental innovation enough? Not if you listen to Hugo Spowers of River Simple. Their aim is to eliminate the environmental impact of personal transport. According to Hugo incremental improvements to the efficiency of cars is not enough. What is needed is a whole new business model, beyond selling a car as a product, to selling mobility as a service. This is innovation as ‘whole system design’.

Second, who can achieve this kind of innovation? According to Ramon Arratia from InterfaceFLOR (it won’t be the existing players in a sector. He explained how his company developed a far more sustainable option for sticking down tiles than all of the existing adhesives on the market. Their innovation – to do away with the adhesive altogether and instead use a form of sticky tabs. Is it realistic to expect an adhesive company to uninvent the adhesive? Or for a car manufacturer to completely reconfigure there existing, highly profitable business model? For Ramon disruptive innovation will only emerge from companies moving into lateral markets – not from existing players.

But the overriding lesson from both events was the need to be comfortable with failure. Sir Harold explained how it took James Dyson 5000 experiments before he came up with a working model of his now ubiquitous dual cyclone bagless hoover. Innovation is a trip into the unknown, and when you don’t know where you are going it’s easy to go the wrong way. This is where it gets hard for government: as the swingeing cuts kick in Government is going to feel the need, more so than ever, to show a return for every penny being spent. So, as we make the case for investment in innovation we need to think: what sort of innovation do we need? Who are the right people to make it happen? And have we got the stomach for the inevitable failures we will encounter on the way?

On this issue they have a point – a recent estimate is that taking into account the net export of goods from China to be consumed abroad reduces China’s CO2 emissions by almost a third. Another way of looking at this issue is that countries with a trade deficit (like the US and the UK) have much higher emissions that the conventional Kyoto accounting principles suggest.

What should be done? An economist’s prescription might be to argue for lower consumption in the West (partly achieved by the financial crisis) and carbon border taxes. The problem with these is that they would be difficult to set fairly and transparently, just as accurate carbon labelling hundreds of thousands of products is an almost impossible task. Border taxes would also be viewed as protectionist (as well as being very difficult to get through the WTO).

An alternative starting point would be to recognise that the actors with the most detailed knowledge of global supply chains and their energy inputs are transnational companies. These huge corporates are already very active in driving changes through their supply chains, improving quality and reducing costs, and often have detailed information on how parts and materials are produced. These companies also have considerable market power in sourcing countries. They could demand lower carbon energy sources and greater energy efficiency, but also help suppliers achieve these.

There is already some interest within corporates in “greening” the supply chain. What is missing is an organised pressure from consumers to demand greater progress, providing a powerful motivation for faster and deeper corporate action. This should not be hard to mobilise, since there is evidence that consumers in countries like the UK want the brands they buy to have lower carbon footprints. They are likely to be willing to pay more for lower carbon goods, just as they do so for fair trade goods. This willingness is key, for it is right that western consumers rather than producers in China and elsewhere should pay for the decarbonisation of products, bearing the true cost of their consumption and providing the resources to invest in lower carbon energy.

We also know that this approach can work, because it has worked before. Back in the late 1990s a number of international development charities, such as Christian Aid, ran campaigns for better working conditions amongst suppliers, targeting supermarkets. This successful campaign led to the establishment of the Ethical Trading Initiative, bringing companies, charities and unions together to transform conditions along the supply chain. What we need now is a similar campaign, and a Carbon Trading Initiative.

But what is really striking about the Gulf disaster is how it is changing thinking about oil in the US, in a way in which climate change has so far totally failed to do. Back in 2008, during the Presidential election campaign, Sarah Palin famously led Republican Party rallies in chants of her policy on how to tackle America’s dependence on foreign oil – “Drill, baby, drill!!!” But the blowout in the Gulf has now put drilling decidedly off the agenda. California’s governor Schwartzenegger has already halted plans for offshore drilling in California, and Obama has called for a moratorium on the granting of offshore drilling licenses. It is this kind of event that changes thinking, and if it has any positive side, it lie in a greater interest in alternatives to fossil fuels.

This is a reminder of how different climate change is from other environmental issues, and in particular, how it is not, and is not seen as, a conventional pollution issue. If the 25 million barrels or so of oil spilled to date from the BP well has been used in cars and trucks, around 8 million tonnes of CO2 would have ended up in the atmosphere, but this would have hardly been commented on. If the Gulf disaster teaches us anything about the larger impending disaster of climate change, it is that tackling the latter will require us to think beyond the pollution paradigm.

The economic slump since 2008 means that the existing 20% target now looks a lot easier and cheaper to achieve. The financial crisis also took the steam out of the EU ETS carbon market. With Greece in fiscal meltdown and austerity measures under way in Spain, Portugal and now the UK, Europe may well see a serious double dip recession, making even a 30% target much less scary than it seems. A shift up to 30% would also have resuscitated the carbon market. But of course there has been resistance, not least from Germany and eastern Europe, but also the Confederation of British Industry here in the UK. All of this is a reminder of how politically difficult a direct target-led approach is.

On the face of it, this looks like a real blow for those who think Europe should try to rescue its global climate leadership in the wake of the Copehagen fiasco. However, it is far from clear that just hiking the target up from 20% to 30% would really impress anyone. Chinese observers, for example, can see the effects of the recession very clearly (it will help the UK meet its first carbon budget with very little additional effort, according to the Climate Change Commitee). What would impress internationally is demonstration of real decarbonisation, with or without new targets. But with new unabated coal-fired power stations still being built across Europe, showing-by-doing is still some way off.