Political Climate

Like a lot of other European governments, Britain’s still relatively new coalition leaders are keen on fiscal austerity, and this week will see a spending review that is expected to lay out cuts of over £65 billion over the next 6 years. The ostensible reason for all this slashing is the UK’s national debt, which has reached £1,000 billion (over 70% of GDP). Against this background, it may sound mad to argue for more public borrowing in order to pay for investments in low carbon technologies and infrastructure, but that is what I am going to do in this post. Continue reading →

We’re pretty skeptical about the political reach of the 10:10 campaign. But, thinking back to our recent post comparing Make Poverty History to climate campaigning, 10:10 is more akin to the wide and shallow nature of the former than the narrow and often unpalatably deep characteristics of the latter.

No surprise, then, that this morning, 10:10 unveiled a video that came right out of the MPH stables – made by Richard Curtis, no less. Right now, the 10:10 campaign is frantically trying to back pedal from its association with this video (so note that our link above may not work by the time you click on it).

‘No Pressure’, the title of the film, seems to have won few friends on either side of the climate debate and also to have attracted enemies. It has been derided by 350.org’s Bill McKibben, writing on the almost never funny and frequently maniacal Climate Progress. It has been branded eco-fascism by James Delingpole in the UK’s Telegraph, but then one should never take Delingpole’s pronouncements at face value. He’s what’s know as a humourist in polite circles and a piss-taker elsewhere. Continue reading →

Blogging from the Labour Party Conference in Manchester, Political Climate has picked up on some new polling by YouGov for Policy Network. This  survey was aimed at getting the Labour Party to understand how voters see it, but it also has some interesting insights for the politics of climate change. Continue reading →

I’ve got a rather provocatively titled piece coming out in the next issue of Political Quarterly, about two different ways of approaching climate change politics put forward by the two Miliband brothers, currently locked in a struggle for the leadership of Britain’s Labour Party. Continue reading →

Our letter is published in today’s Guardian newspaper. You can read it here and below:

The Guardian, Letters, 23 September 2010.

Dear Sir

George Monbiot is right to highlight politics as the main blocker to action on climate change (Climate change enlightenment was fun while it lasted. But now it’s dead, 21 September). It’s only a shame it’s taken him and many others so long to recognise what the evidence has been saying for some time.

Climate change is a long-term problem that requires short-term responses. Polls suggest that about two-thirds of people accept the role of humans in changing the climate, but tend not to prioritise it when at the checkout or ballot box. Thus while political and corporate rhetoric has increased in recent years, there have been few costly investments in new technology. Continue reading →

In Today’s Guardian newspaper in the UK, environmental columnist George Monbiot has seemingly woken up to the politics of climate change – almost. He finishes a lengthy soliloquy to the global climate change negotiations and climate campaigning more generally with the following:

‘All I know is that we must stop dreaming about an institutional response that will never materialise and start facing a political reality we’ve sought to avoid. The conversation starts here.’

The conversation in fact began a while ago, notably over at the Breakthrough Institute in the US and in Anthony Giddens book. Continue reading →

Here’s a post that might equally well be entitled ‘better late than never’; I’ve finally got around to looking at this year’s data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance contained within the UNEP-SEFI global trends report. It’s fascinating and puts in context the last post on this blog which focused on the demise of emissions target-setting.

New investment in sustainable energy globally fell by 7 per cent in 2009, compared to 2008, to a total of $162 billion. This should not cause major concern since levels of investment are highly likely to fluctuate considerably from year-to-year. It’s the average over time that matters and the UNEP report points out that this was still the second highest annual investment in sustainable energy on record.

But it’s the detail rather than the aggregate data that’s of interest. Continue reading →

To cries of ‘now you tell us,’ Yvo de Boer, the man perpetually dubbed ‘former UN climate chief’, has reportedly said ‘Discussions about [emissions] targets have become largely irrelevant in the context of the Copenhagen outcome.’ And, has reportedly also said,’ I don’t think that we’re going to see a dramatic increase in the level of ambition.’

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). Continue reading →

In haste, but because we were recently asked by a climate campaigner friend; can there be a Make Poverty History (MPH) campaign for climate change?

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. Continue reading →

If the Australian electorate used last week’s poll to speak out on climate change, it certainly did not do so without equivocation.

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. Continue reading →