YouGov Founder's Blog

This blog first appeared on my colleague John Humphrys’ YouGov blog.

It is not often that senior politicians use words such as ‘chaos’, ‘farce’ and ‘fiasco’ to describe negotiations they have been involved with, especially when those negotiations concern matters of vital importance. Usually they dress up the weakest of agreements in the clothing of achievement and triumph, saying that because of their own brilliance and far-sightedness the world will now be a safer and happier place.

But not this time. The outcome of the Copenhagen climate change summit is so much more dismal than even the more pessimistic pundits predicted that almost no one is trying to pretend otherwise. But does this mean that the initial hopes were always far too unrealistic? And is there any hope that a more effective deal may still be struck?

The UN-run Copenhagen conference was set up as the successor to the Kyoto treaty on climate change signed in 1997. Kyoto was an attempt to get international agreement to curb the rise in the earth’s temperature as a result of the increasing volumes of man-made gases accumulating in the atmosphere as a consequence of industrialisation. An almost universal scientific consensus argues that man-made emissions threaten to raise the temperature to a point that will cause untold damage to the human occupation of the planet by the end of this century.

Copenhagen, it was hoped, would be different from Kyoto in two particular ways. First of all, it was hoped that an agreement would be made which the United States, the world’s biggest economy and up to now the main contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, could sign up to, as it had not done with Kyoto. And secondly, the new deal would include curbs on developing nations (as Kyoto had not), especially the fastest-growing developing countries such as India and China, now itself the greatest producer of emissions.

The goal was, in simple terms, a legally-binding treaty which would set a limit of a rise in temperature of 2 degrees Celsius (the maximum thought compatible with holding off disaster). It would also impose a limit on emissions consistent with such a target and provide funding by the rich, developed countries for poorer, developing countries to compensate them for the constraints such targets would place on them in the ways they could try to grow their way out of poverty.

But almost none of this came about. Hopes for a legally-binding treaty were dead before the conference even began. And at the close the formal UN conference actually agreed on nothing at all – it merely ‘noted’ an ‘accord’ agreed between five countries, the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. That accord simply acknowledged the validity of the 2 deg target, agreed on the need for emission cuts to meet it (without spelling out what they should be or how they should be imposed), and called on developed countries to fund the payment of $10bn a year from 2012 rising to $100bn a year in 2020 to developing countries. But quite who was going to provide that funding was left unclear.

President Obama called the accord an ‘important breakthrough’, but even he acknowledged that far more still needed to be done and few other leaders have even tried to claim that degree of success.

Since the failure of the conference, blame has been flying in all directions. Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International, said: “Instead of committing to deep cuts in emissions and putting new public money on the table to help solve the climate crisis, rich countries have bullied developing nations to accept far less. Those most responsible for putting the planet in this mess have not shown the guts required to fix it and have instead acted to protect short-term political interests. ”Muhammed Chowdhury, a negotiator for the G77 group of 132 developing states, said: “The hopes of millions of people from Fiji to Grenada, Bangladesh to Barbados, Sudan to Somalia have been buried.”

Nearer home, the energy and climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, accused China, Sudan and several left-wing Latin American countries, of trying to ‘hold the world to ransom’ by preventing a deal being reached. He said the way the UN conference had been run was a ‘chaotic process dogged by procedural games’ and that reform of the UN system was needed if progress was ever to be made. Gordon Brown said: “Never again should we face the deadlock that threatened to pull down [the] talks. Never again should we let a global deal to move towards a greener future be held to ransom by only a handful of countries.”

So what chance is there now of any future deal? A successor meeting to Copenhagen is already scheduled for Mexico City in December 2010, but it seems unlikely that reform of UN procedures will have been agreed by then, let alone sufficient coming together on the substantive issues.

Some people argue that it was always beyond the scope of diplomacy to reach the sort of global deal needed. Nation states, they argue, always look after their own interests first, and those are always interpreted in a short-term way, perhaps especially so among democracies where political leaders face elections in which short-term pain is likely to loom larger than long-term gain.

Such critics have argued that the whole Kyoto/Copenhagen approach is the wrong one to follow. Instead of trying cut emissions, they say, we should instead by concentrating our efforts on mitigating the effects of a climate change we cannot do much to prevent. Such an approach would be more effective, less expensive and allow for the genuine uncertainties that exist about the speed of climate change and the precise consequences it will bring in its wake, they claim.

But supporters of the emission-cutting approach say that that is just a cop-out put forward by people who would rather not face up to the danger that is staring us in the face. Prevention, they say, is always better than damage-limitation, so we have to keep trying to cut emissions.

But the failure of Copenhagen has raised real doubts in the minds even of those who believe the world does need to cut its greenhouse gas emissions as to whether a UN-based attempt to reach a global agreement can work. Some of them are beginning to put their faith instead in the two biggest polluters, the US and China, doing a deal between themselves to curb emissions which, after all, they both recognise will harm them too. The trouble with that, though, is that the rest of the world will have to go along with what the big boys agree and that may end up being not too much to everyone else’s liking.

What’s your view? Are you disappointed by the result of Copenhagen or is its failure what you expected? Who do you think was to blame for the failure? How much faith do you put in the accord agreed between the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa? Do you think there is any future for a UN-based attempt to halt global warming? Could a bilateral deal between the US and China offer any hope? What do you make of the argument that we should be concentrating less on trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and more on trying to mitigate the effects of global warming? And ultimately do you think it will be possible for the human race to find a way to prevent global warming becoming a real threat to human life on the planet, or do you think it is beyond us?

Let us know what you think.