[Reader-list] Monbiot piece

[Nagraj Adve]

Climate change enlightenment was fun while it lasted. But now it's dead

The collapse of the talks at Copenhagen took away all momentum for
change and the lobbyists are back in control. So what next?

The closer it comes, the worse it looks. The best outcome anyone now
expects from December's climate summit in Mexico is that some
delegates might stay awake during the meetings. When talks fail once,
as they did in Copenhagen, governments lose interest. They don't want
to be associated with failure, they don't want to pour time and energy
into a broken process. Nine years after the world trade negotiations
moved to Mexico after failing in Qatar, they remain in diplomatic
limbo. Nothing in the preparations for the climate talks suggests any
other outcome.

A meeting in China at the beginning of October is supposed to clear
the way for Cancún. The hosts have already made it clear that it's
going nowhere: there are, a top Chinese climate change official
explains, still "huge differences between developed and developing
countries". Everyone blames everyone else for the failure at
Copenhagen. Everyone insists that everyone else should move.

But nobody cares enough to make a fight of it. The disagreements are
simultaneously entrenched and muted. The doctor's certificate has not
been issued; perhaps, to save face, it never will be. But the harsh
reality we have to grasp is that the process is dead.

In 2012 the only global deal for limiting greenhouse gas emissions –
the Kyoto protocol – expires. There is no realistic prospect that it
will be replaced before it elapses: the existing treaty took five
years to negotiate and a further eight years to come into force. In
terms of real hopes for global action on climate change, we are now
far behind where we were in 1997, or even 1992. It's not just that we
have lost 18 precious years. Throughout the age of good intentions and
grand announcements we spiralled backwards.

Nor do regional and national commitments offer more hope. An analysis
published a few days ago by the campaigning group Sandbag estimates
the amount of carbon that will have been saved by the end of the
second phase of the EU's emissions trading system, in 2012; after the
hopeless failure of the scheme's first phase we were promised that the
real carbon cuts would start to bite between 2008 and 2012. So how
much carbon will it save by then? Less than one third of 1%.

Worse still, the reduction in industrial output caused by the
recession has allowed big polluters to build up a bank of carbon
permits which they can carry into the next phase of the trading
scheme. If nothing is done to annul them or to crank down the proposed
carbon cap (which, given the strength of industrial lobbies and the
weakness of government resolve, is unlikely) these spare permits will
vitiate phase three as well. Unlike the Kyoto protocol, the EU's
emissions trading system will remain alive. It will also remain
completely useless.

Plenty of nations – like Britain – have produced what appear to be
robust national plans for cutting greenhouse gases. With one exception
(the Maldives), their targets fall far short of the reductions needed
to prevent more than two degrees of global warming.

Even so, none of them are real. Missing from the proposed cuts are the
net greenhouse gas emissions we have outsourced to other countries and
now import in the form of manufactured goods. Were these included in
the UK's accounts, alongside the aviation, shipping and tourism gases
excluded from official figures, Britain's emissions would rise by 48%.
Rather than cutting our contribution to global warming by 19% since
1990, as the government boasts, we have increased it by about 29%.
It's the same story in most developed nations. Our apparent success
results entirely from failures elsewhere.

Hanging over everything is the growing recognition that the United
States isn't going to play. Not this year, perhaps not in any year. If
Congress couldn't pass a climate bill so feeble that it consisted of
little but loopholes while Barack Obama was president and the
Democrats had a majority in both houses, where does hope lie for
action in other circumstances? Last Tuesday the Guardian reported that
of 48 Republican contenders for the Senate elections in November only
one accepted that man-made climate change is taking place. Who was he?
Mike Castle of Delaware. The following day he was defeated by the Tea
Party candidate Christine O'Donnell, producing a full house of science
deniers. The enlightenment? Fun while it lasted.

What all this means is that there is not a single effective instrument
for containing man-made global warming anywhere on earth. The response
to climate change, which was described by Lord Stern as "a result of
the greatest market failure the world has seen", is the greatest
political failure the world has ever seen.

Nature won't wait for us. The US government's National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration reports that the first eight months of 2010
were as hot as the first eight months of 1998 – the warmest ever
recorded. But there's a crucial difference. In 1998 there was a record
El Niño – the warm phase of the natural Pacific temperature
oscillation. The 2010 El Niño was smaller (an anomaly peaking at
roughly 1.8C, rather than 2.5C), and brief by comparison to those of
recent years. Since May the oscillation has been in its cool phase (La
Niña): even so, June, July and August this year were the second
warmest on record. The stronger the warnings, the less capable of
action we become.

Where does this leave us? How should we respond to the reality we have
tried not to see: that in 18 years of promise and bluster nothing has
happened? Environmentalists tend to blame themselves for these
failures. Perhaps we should have made people feel better about their
lives. Or worse. Perhaps we should have done more to foster hope. Or
despair. Perhaps we were too fixated on grand visions. Or
techno-fixes. Perhaps we got too close to business. Or not close
enough. The truth is that there is not and never was a strategy
certain of success, as the powers ranged against us have always been
stronger than we are.

Greens are a puny force by comparison to industrial lobby groups, the
cowardice of governments and the natural human tendency to deny what
we don't want to see. To compensate for our weakness, we indulged a
fantasy of benign paternalistic power – acting, though the political
mechanisms were inscrutable, in the wider interests of humankind. We
allowed ourselves to believe that, with a little prompting and
protest, somewhere, in a distant institutional sphere, compromised but
decent people would take care of us. They won't. They weren't ever
going to do so. So what do we do now?

I don't know. These failures have exposed not only familiar political
problems, but deep-rooted human weakness. 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.