The war of words over home-produced electricity feed-in tariffs could cost dearly

Jonathon Porritt, March 18th 2010, Built environment, Climate change

On March 2nd, Guardian columnist George Monbiot launched an extraordinary attack on feed-in tariffs and on solar photovoltaics (PV) in particular. Even for George, who has honed his invective skills to a fine point over the years, his language was remarkably intemperate: “pricey conceit… great green rip-off… scam… comically inefficient… squandering the public’s money… perfectly useless…  a swindle… blinded by sentiment” etc, etc.

A lot of this seemed to be aimed, very personally, at Jeremy Leggett, Executive Chairman of Solarcentury. For years, Jeremy has been flying the flag for the UK solar industry and for the benefits for introducing the kind of feed-in tariffs that have transformed the renewable energy scene in many other countries.

Within a couple of days, Jeremy had mounted a robust defence of PV, feed-in tariffs and the importance of maintaining a long-term perspective. Citing 13 examples of inaccuracy, misrepresentation and hyperbole (reinforced by a further 12 points following up on a response from George), he has set out to set the record straight.

Over the weekend I spent a happy hour reading through this four-phase battle, point by point. It matters. There’s a lot resting on the success of these feed-in tariffs, and that in turn depends on trust on the part of the general public. A George Monbiot polemic is purpose-built to undermine that trust.

I really admire George. He’s a brilliant campaigning journalist, and a deep, persistent thorn in the side of today’s political and business elites. I often end up reading his Guardian articles metaphorically punching the air at the blows that he’s landed – on my behalf, as it were. This week’s article on biodiversity here in the UK is hugely impactful.

But I’m sorry to say, on this occasion, that he’s way out of line. Jeremy Leggett’s detailed refutation of so much of what he was claiming in the original article demonstrates just how poor George’s initial research was, and how (on this occasion, at least) his love of adopting deliberately controversialist positions simply overwhelmed basic journalistic standards.

This too is a serious matter. As one or two bloggers have already pointed out, if he’s got it this badly wrong on feed-in tariffs, what’s to say he hasn’t got it equally wrong on other critical issues?

One of the talking points for me was that George declined on a number of occasions to meet with Jeremy and talk all this through – despite knowing full well the impact his article would have. More than anything else, this reveals a streak of know-it-all arrogance that has always been there in George, but which he usually keeps under control.

But rather than take my word, why don’t you check it out for yourself on the Guardian and Jeremy’s own websites. If nothing else, it will help you get your head around the complexities of feed-in tariffs.

George Monbiot's article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/01/solar-panel-feed-in-tariff
 
Jeremy Leggett's response: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2010/mar/09/george-monbiot-bet-solar-pv or http://www.jeremyleggett.net/solar-revolution/

George Monbiot has responded to this blog on Jonathon's personal site, read what he says here.

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Oil threat prompts call for green industrial revolution

David Mason, March 16th 2010, Climate change, General, Transport

Soaring oil prices may drive politicians to take tough action to create a low-carbon economy while sceptics are still arguing the toss over climate change.

The era of cheap oil is ending and, unless we take urgent measures to reduce our dependence on it, Britain – and by extension other oil-importing countries – faces a crisis as early as 2015, according to the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security.

Its latest report, which calls for a “green industrial revolution” was launched a few weeks ago by a panel of high-profile business leaders: Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Group, Phllip Dilley, chairman of Arup, Ian Marchant, CEO of Scottish and Southern Energy, Brian Souter, CEO of Stagecoach Group, Jeremy Leggett, chairman of Solarcentury, and Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic.

We’re used to hearing this call from environmentalists and climate change campaigners, but these leaders come to the same conclusion based purely on the availability of oil. The message: regardless of whether or not you believe in man-made climate change, we still have to decarbonise our economy.

The taskforce claims that within the next decade, possibly as early as 2015, we will have reached peak oil - the maximum rate at which we can pump oil out of the ground. It forecasts that prices will soar because demand from developing countries is still growing and because new oil reserves are increasingly expensive to exploit.

Developed world economies have been built on the premise of cheap and plentiful oil, so shortages and high prices are likely to affect vast areas of our lives, causing social, economic and political disruption. We use oil for transport, heating, fertilisers and plastics - so high prices will feed through into more expensive food, travel, utility bills and goods in our shops. The poorest people are likely to be worst hit.

Countries which rely on oil imports will be badly hit. Although North Sea oil is still flowing, the UK has been a net importer since 2006, and the Taskforce warns that it could face a balance of payments crisis by the middle of the decade.

No wonder then that the report is called: ‘The oil crunch – a wake-up call for the UK economy’. It makes an explicit link with the credit crunch and warns that the UK must not be caught out again and needs to take action now.

The report calls for the new UK government, after the election, to work with local authorities, business and consumers to put in place policies to deal with the threat of peak oil. Key recommendations include support for low-carbon transport technology and sustainable bio-fuels; a focus on energy efficiency and the development of alternative sources of energy, including renewables and nuclear; and incentives to encourage the public to adopt greener behaviour.

The danger of framing the argument for a low-carbon economy solely in terms of climate change is that many people remain determined sceptics. The science is complex, scandals like the University of East Anglia emails shake public faith, and many feel they are being asked to take painful action now to avert a distant and nebulous threat.

In contrast, peak oil offers a clear and present danger. Oil is part of our daily life, we’ve all experienced the pain of petrol price spikes and it’s easy to understand the damaging consequences of a sustained increase in prices. Peak oil could just be the unambiguous threat we need to galvanise the green industrial revolution.

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The science of uncertainty

Sara Parkin, March 2nd 2010, Climate change, Forum founders

What are we to make of the furore around climate science? There are implications for environmental campaigners, government and businesses currently agonising over the implementation of low carbon strategies, as well as for scientists - climate scientists in particular - and the whole scientific community in general.

To start with thee and me. Most of us won’t have a degree in science, and may not even have a GCSE in one of the natural sciences. So we tend to trust what the scientists say without considering too closely what they mean. Consequently, we are rubbish at understanding the uncertainty that is intrinsic in all scientific inquiry. Climate science is no different. A hypothesis was made: that the most recent warming is mainly due to greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere by human activity. This hypothesis developed from the fact that we’ve known since the 19th century certain gases warm the climate, and that humans now generate a lot more of these gases. Despite a lot of effort over the last 40 years, this hypothesis has not been disproved.

As a consequence, climate scientists consider the likelihood that human emissions of greenhouse gases are contributing to a warming climate to be very likely – i.e. 90% certain. The figures below gives the degrees of certainty the IPCC gives to its conclusions. The big step between labelling something likely or very likely means the latter appellation is not given lightly.

Source: IPCC Report (2007) Summary for Policy Makers p53

Nothing in the ‘climategate’ scandals undermines this conclusion. Where thee and me need to get sharper is in comprehending the various levels of uncertainty attached to the projected consequences. In policy and decision-making terms uncertainty translates into risk management strategies – and something with a 90% chance of being true would surely top the risk register. As David Mackay, DECC Chief Scientific Advisor puts it: “since 1750 we have burnt ½ trillion tonnes of carbon, and are on track to burn the second 1/2 trillion in less than 40 years.  The cumulative consequences of that first 500 billion tonnes suggest the next 500 billion (and the rest) ought to stay underground.” (Mackay, 2009)

It would be astonishing if that scale of intervention in the natural cycles of the earth would be without adverse consequence. 

So, ‘climategate’ does not let any of us off the hook of responsibility for serious action – by governments, organisations and individuals. 

And no more excuses for us becoming anything but much more intelligent consumers of science. Promoting selected conclusions of climate science as irrefutable facts has long been the vice of media, but environmental organisations really ought to know better. Now, bereft of a trusted interlocutor to help them understand the science, the public is unsurprisingly withdrawing ‘belief’ that climate change is actually happening. Both climate scientists and campaigning organisations have a lot to do to rekindle that trust. As do governments. Even though we may (rightly) whinge at their muddled prevarication, governments have not (yet) faltered in their risk analysis that there is enough certainty around climate change to justify action. Businesses that have reached the same conclusion need to ramp up the evidence that they too are of serious intent. Mutuality of benefit in the business-government-public triangle of climate change action depends on the thread of trust not being broken.

So what about the climate scientists? As I suggested in my last blog on climate science there are only very small reasons to question the methodology of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that right now is soliciting evidence for its fifth report.  When IPCC chief, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, he returns from his Communications 101 course, he will be making sure his organisation’s perfectly good methodologies are rigorously implemented. Paradoxically, trust in climate science could be enhanced by the whole sorry tale.  

One positive outcome should be more discipline and aptitude for communication amongst senior climate scientists. The few who became caught up in the excitement of it all and sacrificed dispassionate presentation of evidence to campaigning fervour have risked the reputation of all science. Science funders know it must not happen again.

Bob May, one time government Chief Scientist points out that science progresses through organised scepticism – continual challenging of research outcomes to both extend knowledge and improve certainty. He’s really cross that the word ‘sceptic’ has been recruited, not by genuine challengers of research outcomes (and methodologies) but by what I have dubbed the malicious naysayers. Very different from those who deny something out of fear or misunderstanding, these naysayers are driven by knowingly wrong motives, and are often paid by organistions with the most to lose should low-carbon policies be implementated with any seriousness.

Separating the useful sceptics and contrarians from the malicious naysayers is vital. They need to be challenged head on. And the best way to do that - something all science needs to take on board - is transparency and far more involvement of the public in science – upstream where research projects are designed as well as downstream where the outcomes are debated. 

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Time to press the panic button?

Jonathon Porritt, February 5th 2010, Climate change, Forum founders

I’m still reeling from the surreal sight of Lord Whacko Monckton (the climate contrarians’ eccentric of choice), captured on Newsnight last night doing an imitation of Al Gore at a public meeting in Australia. Frightening stuff.

Whenever I see Monckton at work, it reminds me just how desperate people must be to have their doubts and prejudices about climate change affirmed by some public figure – indeed, by any public figure at this stage of the debate.

The politics of climate change in Australia are even worse that they are here in the UK. That may well be, paradoxically, because changes in their own micro-climates over the last 10 years have been so much more visible. And painful. And this has polarised the debate about whether these changes are primarily a consequence of man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, or primarily natural climate variability. The end result is that the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, might have to call a general election to break the impasse on his proposals for a carbon-trading scheme.

Could it get that bad here in the UK? Very improbably, but the whole tenor of the debate has deteriorated so badly, so rapidly, that it's now a serious political headache, rather than a minor irritant.

The combination of the ‘climate gate’ fiasco at the University of East Anglia and the growing concerns about the workings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), broader concerns of the whole peer review process (the so-called ‘Gold Standard’ of scientific research), and the utter failure of Copenhagen has transformed the climate debate here in the UK.

Where they were once thought as contrarian outliers, both the Daily Mail and the Daily Express are now thought to be closely aligned with public opinion. Ed Miliband (the Secretary of State in the Dept of Energy and Climate Change) must be in despair.

So should we be pressing the panic button? I think we should. The damage done to the credibility not just of climate science but also of the UK’s entire approach to climate change is already serious – and getting worse. This could be extremely problematic in the run up to the general election.

So if I was Gordon Brown, I would be asking David Cameron and Nick Clegg to issue a joint invitation to Martin Rees, the President of the Royal Society, asking him to convene a high-level Scientific Panel to comment on ‘the state of the science’ two years from the publication of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report at the end of 2007.

Does it still stack up? What should people make of all these recent revelations? Is the Climate Change Act (to which all three political parties have signed up) still based on robust scientific foundations? Can people still have confidence in the way climate science drives climate policy?

Martin Rees would be asked to recruit three or four top scientists (reflecting different shades of opinion), a couple of business people (like James Dyson or Richard Lambert of the CBI), and a couple of scientifically-literate ‘pillars of the community’ in whom the general public has absolute trust. No NGOs, let alone campaigners!

Give them two months. Bang out a short, sharp report written for lay people, not for scientists. Blitz the media. Run a full-page ad in the Mail and Express for weeks on end – instead of today’s highly questionable ‘Act on CO2 ‘ ads.

Overkill? Possibly. It seems ludicrous that what is still by any standards a rock-solid scientific consensus should have to be shored up by such extreme measures. But if we don’t, might we be looking at an Aussie-style meltdown in public opinion in the near term?

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If climate change didn’t exist, would we have to invent it?

Martin Wright, February 4th 2010, Climate change

This mischievous thought occurred to me as I was wading through the latest sclerotic surge of climate scepticism – which is fast becoming the press’s default position on the issue. (If the mainstream media really is engaged in a mass conspiracy to boost ‘warmism’, as James Delingpole and his like insist, then it’s doing a pretty lousy job of it...)

In December, it was Climategate and the embarrassing farce that was Copenhagen. Last month we had Glaciergate: the revelation that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had managed to include in one of its reports the wildly unfounded claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt to nothing in the next 25 years.

Proof that climate science is all a wild exaggeration, as some claimed? Actually, no, it was just proof that the most august international bodies can make a complete prat of themselves along with the rest of us.

But next month you can bet there’ll be another shock exposé, as the hounds of scepticism scent blood on the lumbering tracks of the climate consensus, and the media, having decided that global warming is sooo last century, daahlings, cheer them on to the kill.

In practice, of course, the same boring old science which has welded that consensus together hasn’t changed one bit. The global temperature is rising rapidly, and there’s no plausible explanation for it other than greenhouse gases. We can’t say for sure what the effects might be, but since it appears to be on track to take us right out of the comfort zone in which human civilisation has evolved and flourished, then, on balance, we probably ought to do everything we can to cool things down.

And, er, that’s it. Very boring. Go back to your homes, nothing to see here.

Except, what if we’re wrong? What if somehow, against all the weight of accumulated evidence, climate change does indeed prove to be a myth?

Well then, we’d be mad to waste our money and effort on... what, exactly?

Renewable energy? Not such a waste in the light of peak oil and politically vulnerable gas supplies, though, is it?

Energy efficiency? Ditto, with bells on.

Forest conservation? Pretty essential if we’re to stem the crash in biodiversity and reduce floods and soil erosion.

A shift to electric cars, alongside more walking and cycling? Enjoy cleaner, quieter streets, a healthier populace, and reduced pressure on health service budgets...

Technology transfer to the developing world? Managed properly, it could be one of the most effective ways of lifting people out of poverty – not to mention boosting emerging economies.

And so on, and so forth...

Almost all the stuff we need to do to slow global warming is stuff we probably want – and eventually, will need – to do anyway. We might do it a little earlier than otherwise, but if we plan for it, and stick to those plans, we can make the transition that much smoother, and more cost-effective.

So what’s not to like?

Yes, I am being a bit simplistic. Without climate change, we wouldn’t spend billions on unproven technologies like carbon capture and sequestration, and we might pause before rushing into biofuels with quite such forest-felling abandon. But overall, the ‘co benefits’ of robust action to tackle climate change have been vastly understated.

It was neatly summed up by a cartoon doing the rounds at Copenhagen. It shows a climate sceptic pointing in horror at a flipchart listing all the positives of a low-carbon economy:

Copyright 2009 Joel Pett.  Posted by permission.

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Overdoing the eco-pragmatism

Peter Madden, January 19th 2010, Climate change

I went with anticipation to a ‘Bristol Festival of Ideas’ talk earlier this week, where Stewart Brand, chaired by Brian Eno, was talking about his new book Whole Earth Discipline. I left feeling rather dispirited.

For those of you who don’t know Brand, he is the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a grand old man of the US environmental movement.

His central message was that the problems facing the world are so great that we have to do “whatever works” in order to tackle them. That means concentrating people in cities, and embracing GM, nuclear power and geo-engineering. We are changing the earth so profoundly anyway, he argued, that we might as well do more of it.

I am a big technological optimist myself and am certainly on the eco-pragmatist side of the movement. But I found Brand’s recipe – at least as he dished it out in Bristol - unfulfilling.

His was a totally technocratic version of the world, encouraging us to “focus on the numbers” and “just do what works”. There was no room for vision or values, just a managerial approach to engineering the status quo.

Brand told us to “put aside ideology” and ridiculed most environmentalists as luddites who “would have opposed the wheel”.

While I liked Brand’s willingness to slaughter sacred cows, I was troubled by what he didn’t say. Surely we need both technological answers and changed values? Surely the environment movement shouldn’t be shorn of all sense of vision? Is more of the same, just better managed, really enough?

Read more about Whole Earth Discipline (publishers website)

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Erosion: the dilemma of the decade

Anna Simpson, January 15th 2010, Climate change, General, Travel and tourism

It was the sort of mud that seems intent on dragging you down, slurping up your ankles and slipping under your soles. But the view redeemed all seven miles of undignified tumbles and slides as I walked from Lyme Regis to Seaton on the UK’s Jurassic Coast. Sparse vegetation skidded down the exposed bones of the cliffs, irate waves clawing at them like wildcats. I got back to the B&B to find a lively discussion under way about huge boulders tumbling down to the sea on an almost daily basis – while heedless tourists fumble around for fossils below…

Ever since ten-year-old Mary Anning found a complete ichthyosaurus some 200 years ago, Lyme Regis has been a hub for fossil hunters. It’s all thanks to giant mudslides – the largest in Europe – that expose new rocks and leave Jurassic remains scattered across the beaches.

For geologists, this ongoing erosion makes the site a whole lot more interesting – but
rising sea levels and freak storms are changing the shape of coastlines around the world at a violent rate. Defences like jetties and marinas can keep the waves at bay – but they also stop coastal habitats and systems from responding to the changes in their own way. This can detract from the fossil-strewn appeal of beaches: not great for local economies dependent on tourism.

The question is, how to find the right balance between preserving towns like Lyme Regis and its surroundings for visitors – on the one hand – and protecting the natural life and geological interest of the coast, a World Heritage Site, on the other.

It’s a small case in point, but as the climate teeters, knowing when to interfere – and just how far to go – could be the dilemma of the decade.

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The empathy gap

Helen Clarkson, January 5th 2010, Climate change, General

As I read this weekend’s papers and made my way through lists of things to make me a better person this year, one piece of wisdom stood out from the usual litany of drink less, exercise more, go to bed earlier - a call for us to be more empathetic.

Roman Krznaric’s suggestion, in The Observer, sounded more interesting than all of the others (though of course I’ll be giving those a shot too), so I duly looked at his blog: www.outrospection.org where, amongst other thoughts, he has a very interesting piece on empathy and climate change.  There’s also a full article here.

Krznaric’s argument is that empathy is a powerful emotional tool that can be mobilised to create social change.  He offers the historical example of the rise of the social movement that challenged slavery, which created an outpouring of empathy from the public, and quotes historian Adam Hochschild as saying “The abolitionists placed their hope not in sacred texts, but in human empathy”.

We need that scale of empathetic response, he says, to deal with climate change, and to close the gap between knowledge and action.

He points to two types of empathetic response that we need – through time (to future generations) and across space (to people living now in developing countries).  This is familiar territory to anyone who’s thought long and hard about sustainable development which has right at its heart the ideas of inter- and intra-generational justice, i.e. that we should develop in a way that allows others now and in the future to meet their needs.

The problem has been how to take the idea that we all have the same entitlement to meeting our needs, put this into practice and articulate it at a policy level.  Krznaric is suggesting that empathy provides a way of bridging the gap, where political and economic arguments fail.

Empathy has definitely started moving up the agenda in recent years, particularly as it’s a topic which Barack Obama has talked so much about, referring often to what he calls the ‘empathy deficit’: “When those of us in comfort can’t look at a child in poverty and say ‘they’re just like my kid, they’re as special as mine’”.

Examples of the use of empathy in public policy can also be found with the success of movements such as that for Restorative Justice, which brings together the victims of crimes with their perpetrators. It has been shown to be beneficial for both, and to reduce re-offending rates.  By putting themselves in the place of the other, both sides it seems have much to gain.

I spent some time last year wondering if we wouldn’t be doing better on climate change if we had more women leaders?  It feels like there’s still a lot of belief in the macho-techno solution that is going to come from somewhere at some point and sort this out, without the need for behaviour change. 

However, I’ve decided this isn’t to do with male versus female, but the sort of leaders we tend to go for.  A year into office and Obama is already accused of not ‘doing’ enough.  It seems people don’t want leaders who think, or empathise, they want people who (appear to) act: reflective types need not apply.

But I think Krznaric is right.  We’re going to need a huge dose of empathy to sort this out, at every level.  It’s a nice thought experiment to wonder how Obama would find running China for a week, and vice versa with Wen Jiabao.  I don’t think we’ll persuade them to do it.  But if we teach ourselves to empathise more with others, maybe we’ll learn to press our politicians for the right sort of solutions.  We may also choose different politicians, and look for different characteristics in our leaders.  I wonder how differently Copenhagen would have turned out with a bit more empathy?

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Copenhagen flop means business must take a stand

Ben Tuxworth, December 22nd 2009, Business, Climate change, General, International

As Copenhagen diminishes in the rear-view mirror, we must still do whatever we can to stop it also sinking beneath the waves.
 
What should organisations make of the Copenhagen Accord (or if you find accord just too challenging, ‘letter of intent’)? With its questionable traction, action-free plan to keep temperature rises under two degrees, vague suggestions about using the markets, technology and forests er…somehow, and unappealing invitation to all nations to record whatever voluntary commitments they’d like to make in a special register, it doesn’t exactly help you believe in Santa again. As China distances itself even from this weedy document, leaving no clear path to something more binding next year, it would be perfectly reasonable to find the whole thing pretty depressing.
 
Whether you blame Denmark, China, or the UN itself, organisations – particularly businesses - hoping that Copenhagen would bring some clarity on the carbon regime they should be planning for, will have to wait. With no clear shared targets, timetable, or approach to markets, the temptation to wait and see before making investments – and then pile into countries with weaker carbon regimes – will be hard to resist. Some companies are already making it clear that if governments were expecting them to make the big investments in the low-carbon transition, they have utterly failed to create the environment required.
 
It would be easy to throw our hands up in despair. But as with all such crises, of course, this is exactly when leadership has to stand up. As Ronan Dunne, CEO of Telefonica O2 pointed out at a recent Forum for the Future event, decisions where you can analyse the numbers for an answer don’t need leaders. Ditto moments when everyone knows what to do. It’s time to decide what you really think about it all, and take a stand.
 
But in the face of uncertainty about carbon, what’s the right leadership stance to adopt? Before COP 15 we had five arguments for action. One was that a future regulatory environment on carbon constituted a risk too potentially expensive to ignore. That one may be on hold. But the others – the arrival of peak oil; the fact that most of what you would do to decarbonise makes social and economic sense anyway; the lesson of history that responding to a constraint can drive game-changing innovation; and the awful truth that there are plenty of other, much less debatable environmental challenges already at the gate – all still stand. Now’s the time to make the most of them.
 
So the post-Copenhagen world means pushing on with pretty much all those things that made business sense at the end of November. And ultimately it means remembering that, somewhere out there in the darkness, climate change itself grinds on, indifferent to our hopes, fears and failed conferences, and still the greatest challenge facing humanity.
 
Merry Christmas!

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Selling a low-carbon life just got harder

Jonathon Porritt, December 21st 2009, Climate change, Forum founders, General, International

From Hopenhagen to Fiascohagen in 12 dire days. Though there are now as many brave faces out there as after defeat in a general election, to bill the Copenhagen accord as anything other than a failure is simply dishonest.

Of course it matters that China, India and the United States have, for the first time, formally recognised the need for “deep cuts” in emissions of CO2. Of course it’s a good thing that rich-world countries have committed “to a goal of mobilising $100 billion a year by 2020” to help the poor world to cope with climate change. And of course it’s critical that the science underpinning these two commitments has been strongly reconfirmed.

Unfortunately, that’s about it. Ed Miliband, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, may well be right in claiming that “there is a danger of too much negativity”, but we have to be realistic about what did and didn’t happen in Copenhagen. The accord itself has no formal standing, and there are no firm figures in it regarding either the scale or urgency of the cuts required, even though many countries are already signed-up to such cuts. There are no details as to how the $100 billion will be raised. Worst of all, there is no commitment to move from this desperately inadequate accord to a legally binding treaty over the next year.

Paradoxically, the greatest cause for hope lies in the depth of that failure. Before Copenhagen, many campaigners had argued that no agreement would be better than a weak agreement. And in effect, that’s exactly what has happened.

The shock of this is only just beginning to sink in — as is the realisation that there is still all to play for before the next conference in Mexico in a year’s time. By that time Barack Obama should have done his deal with the Senate, China should have got used to its new responsibilities as a global climate player and the EU should have recovered sufficiently from the recession to play a more influential leadership role.

It is intriguing to speculate that it might be David Cameron supporting the EU in that role rather than Gordon Brown. In an election year, the domestic fallout from Copenhagen will be intense. And who knows how individual citizens will react to such a confusing scene?

For Gordon Brown, the failure of Copenhagen will be a deep disappointment. He has worked tirelessly over the past 18 months to help to broker a real deal. British embassies around the world (and particularly in China and India) have put climate diplomacy right at the top of their agenda. Mr Miliband has become the most effective member of Mr Brown’s Cabinet, and he personally played a hugely significant role in Copenhagen. Credit where credit is due: on the international stage, no Government has done more to get a legally binding deal on climate change than the UK’s.

However, the Prime Minister will not now be able to lay claim to some Copenhagen breakthrough. The UK’s unforgiving media will give him little slack in that regard. There is no reassuring “global deal” to provide cover for some of the more controversial and unpopular policies that the Government is now bringing forward — on air passenger duty, for instance, or zero-carbon housing. Peter Mandelson’s new-found enthusiasm for a “green industrial revolution” might just slip down that old fixer’s list of things that really matter in a pre-election period.

But there’s no political upside in any of that for David Cameron. Indeed, I suspect that the fallout will prove to be more problematic for Mr Cameron than for Mr Brown. It will give succour to that weird bunch of “grandees” (David Davis, Peter Lilley, Lord Lawson of Blaby et al) who have become increasingly critical of Mr Cameron’s intelligent leadership on climate change.

It will provide new ammunition for the out-and-out “contrarians” scattered through the UK media who remain unpersuaded by the overwhelming consensus on the science of climate change, and who do so much to reinforce people’s uncertainty and confusion.

Though I have no doubt that Mr Cameron will see off the Lawson brigade, he has a much tougher challenge on his hands with local Conservatives. Many of them do not share his enthusiasm for a low-carbon economy, do not want to sign up to the targets in the Climate Change Act, and continue to treat wind farms as if they were invading aliens from another planet. This is not just “a “generation thing”; some of the most vociferous critics of Mr Cameron’s blue-green politics are young thrusters for whom concern for the environment is seen as an ideological aberration.

All of which, I fear, will make it even harder to persuade individuals to play their small but still crucial part in addressing climate change. That feeling of disempowerment (“what difference can we make when China is single-handedly trashing the climate anyway?”) will be reinforced. Politicians will have to get even smarter in making the case — for improved energy efficiency in the home (saving you a lot of money), reduced car use (less congestion, healthier lifestyles), less waste and even more recycling (saving even more money), and more holidays at home rather than abroad (less hassle, good for the economy).

The fact that low-carbon lifestyles are both healthier and cheaper gives politicians plenty to work with. But the past two weeks in Copenhagen have not made that task any easier.

This article was originally printed in The Times, 21 December 2009

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