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.

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.

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.

“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.

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!