An excellent article by James Randerson describes how increased flooding in recent years has led to the Semliki river changing course. The river forms the Congo-Uganda border. Which effectively means it has taken land from Uganda and “given” it to Congo – and vice versa, but Uganda is the net land-loser.

 This is not an abstract matter when it is farmland: “The land where our grandparents used to cultivate – it is now in Congo,” says a farmer who now has to rent the land in Congo that he used to farm in Uganda.

As if the land issue were not enough by itself, this is also an oil issue. Oil has been discovered on the astern bank of Lake Albert and there is prospecting on both the Congolese and Ugandan sides of the Semliki where it flows into the lake.

And if land and oil aren’t enough to make us think about the increasing insecurity of the ordinary farmers living and working in the area, there is the instability and violence in Congo and the history of Uganda’s military involvement in eastern Congo around the turn of the millennium.

And behind all this – the changing climate. Part of this probably caused by carbon emissions because the Semliki is fed from the Rwenzori mountains where the glaciers are melting. But glacial melt is the lesser part of the story of the increased Semliki flooding of recent years. The larger part is erratic rainfall and increasingly heavy rainfall – dryer dry seasons and more intense wet seasons, resulting in soil loss an d burst river banks. Whether this is also caused by carbon emissions is harder to trace.

But in a region that is over-rich in conflict, the Semliki is a vivid demonstration of how local life changes as the climate changes, with the end result of an increased risk of insecurity.

Background conditions

Here are some components of the general context: 

• 1.2 billion people lack access to clean drinking water;
• 2 billion don’t have adequate sanitation;
• the combined population of “water-stressed countries” today is reckoned to be about 2.4 billion;
• by 2015 it’s thought that about 120 countries will be water-stressed;
• Southwest China had its worst drought in a century this year affecting 24 million people;
• the Gobi Desert is expanding by about 2500 square miles each year and its edge is now only some 40-45 miles from Beijing, which frequently suffers severe dust storms;
• a barely reported drought in the Sahel right now affects 10 million people;
• at the current rate of consumption and with no improvement in water retention or new sources, some estimates indicate India is on course to exhaust its freshwater supplies by the middle of this century;
• some analyses indicate Yemen’s capital Sana’a will run out of water around 2017.

These enormous pressing problems explain why the issue of water is not an environmental issue but a fundamental feature of the global political landscape. Or, to put it differently, they explain why an initially environmental issue is a fundamental political challenge. 

Management of risks and resources

World population today is about 6.8 billion. It is expected to be about 9 billion by 2050. Feeding the people is one of the biggest challenges the world community faces in the next half century. To achieve that, the problems indicated by the bullet points above require efficient and creative management

• to find better ways to store and move water so there is less wastage,
• simultaneously to increase the productivity of agriculture so as to use less water in producing more food,
• to involve ordinary people and their communities in identifying the problems and making the decisions that affect their lives,
• and in arriving at equitably shared solutions to common problems so as to minimise conflict risk.

If management of resources and risk is deficient, the consequent problems could be overwhelming – both in the sense of overwhelming poor countries and in the sense of overwhelming the international system’s ability to cope.

As when thinking about the relationship between climate change and conflict, it is misleading to think in terms of a simple causal relationship. The problem is not that water scarcity or climate change more generally will cause violent conflict plain and simple. Rather, the problem is that water scarcity or climate change more generally will inter-act (and, indeed, already are inter-acting) with other features of the social, economic and political landscape to increase the risk of violent conflict. It is where poverty is rampant and governance is weakest and most arbitrary that the risks are greatest and management of them is least effective.

Water wars or cooperation?

In recent years there have been two common statements about the relationship between water and security. The first is that the wars of the future will be about water rather than, say, about oil. Contrariwise, the second is that so far there have been very few international conflicts over water and that shared water resources have more often led to cooperation than conflict.

If the optimism of the second insight vitiates the gloom-laden first, there is sadly some reason to temper that optimism. To begin with, some of the cooperation is between unequal powers and the resulting agreement has been one-sided. In such cases, cooperation masks conflict rather than resolves it.

More importantly, pressure on water resources is likely to grow over the next 40-50 years as the world population continues to grow, urbanisation proceeds apace and more countries, by dint of succeeding with a high growth economic strategy, enter the water-intensive phase of development that China and India are now in.

Global warming, climate change and water

As the globe warms, the consequences for water are the key area of natural consequences that shape the impact of climate change on people and societies. Warmer air retains moisture more than cooler air, which produces a nasty two-sided effect. Many dry areas are, broadly speaking, likely to become drier because the air will more efficiently hold water and deny them rainfall; meanwhile many wet areas will, broadly speaking, get wetter because when the air is ready to dump its water on them there is more water in the air to fall as rain. There are, in addition, areas where drought is likely though it has not previously been experienced very much. There are also areas where the rains will still come but at different times, disturbing both natural cycles and farming patterns. And there are regions where severe weather events are changing their precise location, subjecting new places to typhoons, for example, where residents are not so experienced in dealing with the problems.

Overall, then, climate change will increase water scarcity in some places and increase water excess in others. Both effects are capable of diminishing food security. In different places, the precise effect may be extended drought or an intensification of the monsoon into a shorter period, or less dramatic variations that are nonetheless significant for agriculture. At the extreme, even a rich country like Australia has seen rice production decline vertiginously. In South and Southeast Asia, rice production faces long-term risks of catastrophic proportions, which would have deeply damaging effects for the societies for whom rice is a staple food.

Social consequences

From these effects on food security and livelihood security, there follows a train of knock-on effects – the consequences of consequences – with which regular readers of this blog are now familiar.

It is worth picking one point out of the discussion of conflict effects – the importance of thinking about consequences at different levels. So-called water wars are one thing (so-called because it is axiomatic that no war ever has a single cause, so what might look like a water war when viewed through the lens of water scarcity may look like a completely different kind of war if viewed through the lens of bad governance, ethno-national difference, regional power politics, individual leaders’ political ambitions etc). But the destabilising effects of climate change and its water impact might lead in a different direction.

An article on Reuters AlertNet focuses on the effects of the falling water levels in Lake Naivasha near Nairobi. Less water means less fishing and for those who cannot find other jobs and income it seems that some have turned to crime, for recorded levels of crime in the area are on the increase.

The politics of water management

If water deficiencies are linked to insecurity and conflict risk, it follows that good water management is a part of peacebuilding and peacebuilding can be a part of good water management: both are essential components of human security.

To make this general point via a specific example: in 2008 the Nepalese government knew the Koshi River was at risk of bursting its banks because of a damaged river barrage and contracted an Indian company to carry out repairs in good time. Unfortunately, though the company was ready to start work, a dispute between the labour unions got in the way.

This was not a dispute between labour and management so much as a dispute between the unions themselves, reflecting their conflicting political alignments. These partly reflected divisions in the civil war in Nepal; it had been settled by agreement in 2006 but its conflict divisions persist. Neither the provincial government nor the national government, itself divided between parties whose local and unions representatives were busy feuding, were able to intervene and resolve the conflict over the work on the river barrage.

Accordingly the work on the barrage was not done and the Koshi flooded, displacing over 60,000 people in the Terai region where scores of armed militias are active. The failure of central government to act fed regional resentment and thus instability.

This case shows how conflict complicates good water management, while the absence of good water management (despite good intentions) exacerbates conflict.

To manage the Koshi and rise to other comparable challenges in other developing countries requires the framework of a well functioning state. Where it does not exist because of war or corrupt neglect, the framework of a proper state has to be built. Issues of climate and water management are thus issues of peace and governance; like so much else in development, it is a serious error to let them drift into the category of technical problems that can be quickly fixed.

What is required instead is the slow work of building peaceful states, making it possible for ordinary people in their communities to play their part in the mass of small-scale actions that will be the primary motor for solving the problems of water management. Neither technical nor top-down fixes will meet the bill. But experience in a variety of places is beginning to offer grounds for optimism that small-scale practical solutions can be mobilised and can work. In a report issued by International Alert last November, my colleague Janani Vivekananda and I went into this question and identified some telling examples.

Scientists and their science are in the dock, policy is in the balance and our common future is on the line. This pushes many environmentally concerned people to want to press the case about global warming, climate change and the need for action ever more firmly, ever more clearly, ever more. But will more of the same be more effective?

The condition of underlying public and political perceptions is certainly worrying but I find myself more bothered by the relatively little attention that is given to the basic issue of cognition in the climate issue. I am referring to the difficulty of the future.

Chaff

‘Chaff’ is war-time deception, deliberate interference in perception, guided obfuscation. Fred Pearce has performed a major public service with his Guardian review of the UEA emails, their contents, context and controversy (if only the Guardian would combine his several articles into one easily accessed document). In covering the response to the case of politicians, commentators and citizens who do not accept that climate change is under way or a problem, and despite being seen by some climate scientists as overly negative and plain wrong in his critical remarks, Pearce neatly skewers several examples of chaff – things that are said that the speaker or author must know are tendentious at best and downright inaccurate at worst. The problem with this kind of chaff is that, once launched, it gets picked up and reproduced all over the blogosphere. Notable among these are the claim that the “hockey stick” graph of world temperatures has been disproven – it hasn’t, it has been replicated by other researchers – and the assertion that the UEA scientists and colleagues discuss a trick for hiding a decline world temperature, which wasn’t a trick in the sense of deception and isn’t about a decline in world temperature today.

Noise

The motivated chaff mingles with a great diversity of misunderstanding, mis-perceptions, particular angles, institutional agendas and hobby-horses to generate a lot of distracting background noise, so often difficult to distinguish from actual chaff.

Any article about climate on a major web-site picks up a mass of comment; it is worth following one thread one time to know where at least one part of the debate stands. One of the best single media overviews of the basic science and the state of knowledge was by Geoffrey Lean in the Telegraph back in December. The comment thread on the online version has some interesting back and forth about the basic science and then there’s the claim that those who think global warming is occurring are only saying so as part of a plan to bring in world government or, for one participant, “to completely and utterly squash the Human race.”

And that’s actually a pretty restrained set of comments. When the Sunday Times profiled the head of the UEA Climate Research Unit, Phil Jones, and reported him saying that he had thought of suicide, the comment thread included a torrent of insults, allegations that Jones has gotten rich from faking his science, and a fair amount of encouragement that he go ahead and do it.

Put the emails, the science and Professor Jones himself through a calmer examination and, a different and far more nuanced picture emerges, as you would probably expect once away from the furnace of instant comment on the web.

• There’s no clear reason to think that what he did was in some sense bad science though there are grounds for revisiting some of the temperature research involving climate stations in China.
• As Jones himself has said, he sent ‘awful emails’ but Fred Pearce’s review (link) and one by Associated Press (link) indicates that only a few out of an enormous number were indeed awful. On the other hand, those ones were awful indeed.
• More to the point, the way Jones and colleagues behaved towards scientists who disagreed with them has generated enormous heat and calumny but as far as I can interpret it, they behaved in pretty much the way that academics of all kinds routinely behave towards academics who disagree with them. Dissing each other’s findings in anonymous reviews, protecting peer-reviewed journals they esteem from input they disdain, banding together tribally, getting over-wrought – it’s not good but it is certainly standard practice in the social sciences and I am not in the slightest surprised to see it in the natural sciences too.
• And the strictly limited willingness of Jones and colleagues to release data and methodology is neither more nor less restrictive than that of most scientists – within the band of acceptability albeit not at the very best end of the spectrum.

Overall he comes out of this scrutiny with a pretty average score for a scientist and quite distinctly as a long, long way from malign. Some scientists are good communicators, others not. Like many, I find the most striking thing is how many PR traps he and his colleagues unknowingly laid for themselves. With the benefit of hindsight, how naive they now seem to have been about the fundamentally political nature of their science and the opposition their findings would generate.

And now, I suppose Professor Jones might say if, as we have all been able to see, he is no more than human – now it’s the turn of the other lot to go through the same excruciating process. For example, the Institute of Physics was embarrassed to find out that its submission to the parliamentary committee looking into the emails was shaped by a man who works frequently for major oil and gas companies and thinks that the view that climate change is happening is akin to a religion. Two points about this: first, there is something in the religion charge and, uncomfortable as it is, let’s come back to it. Second, what is notable about almost all the scientific and non-hysterical criticisms of climate change science is that they are extremely weak in postulating alternative explanations.

The critics of climate change science can pick holes, sometimes significant ones, in the hypothesis of human-caused global warming and climate change. They are good and even helpful at identifying uncertainties and any over-statements or dubious inferences. They raise some questions about some pretty fundamental parts of the whole global warming and climate change hypothesis, such as whether sea levels are actually rising. But they don’t offer – or have not so far offered – worthwhile alternative explanations of the observed rise in average global temperatures. They have had nothing significant to say that might offer a different explanation of observed changes in climate. And they have not undone the basic science on the presence and role of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the predominance of carbon among them, and the increase of carbon in the atmosphere thanks to the use of fossil fuels.

The latest major literature review – done at the UK Met Office, looking at more than 100 studies – has once again identified the ‘clear fingerprints’ of man-made climate change; it confirms that, while the science of climate change is not without uncertainties, alternative explanations carry an order of magnitude less conviction. As the Met Office report puts the case, it is an “increasingly remote possibility” that human activity is not the main cause of climate change.

Were there a credible basis for researching a serious hypothesis to make that remote possibility into even a 50:50 chance, we can be sure the research would have been lavishly funded and its findings widely and smoothly disseminated. Big financial interests would be more than happy to help lay the whole climate thing to rest, were it possible to do so.

One day, perhaps? On the record so far, I doubt it. In the meantime, the lack of positive theorisation and hypothesis from the critics of climate science makes it fair to say that even the best of them so far manage only to make noise.

Fog

But let’s get to religion. The Guardian‘s Simon Hoggart refers to himself as a climate agnostic, calling this ‘the only respectable position’ to hold. At a recent off-the-record seminar, I was struck by an American participant ‘s vocabulary. Casting around for a term to describe people who do not accept the global warming and climate change hypothesis, he characterised them as non-believers. Peter Preston says we can only find our way out of the present mess on climate knowledge and policy if a prophet leads us.

Critics of what that prophet might say accuse those who accept that global warming and climate change are real of treating that opinion as a religious belief, while many of those critics themselves display a quasi-religious fervour, use a millenarian discourse, and have the lack of respect for the merit, dignity or simple humanity of their adversaries that is characteristically (though not exclusively) mustered by those who believe their own arguments are blessed by the right faith. But the religiosity of some of the critics of climate change science shouldn’t distract us from acknowledging that many advocates of the global warming and climate change hypothesis do themselves use a kind of religious language. Some who do not, nonetheless have that fervent, religiose tone. Some seem positively to welcome the battle with non-believers, veritable Knights Templar of climatic rectitude.

It’s really pretty distasteful. Beyond the chaff and the noise, a thick fog of unknowing is gathering around climate change as a policy issue and a scientific question. Simply banging on about a true faith cannot dispel that fog, simply add to it. George Monbiot suggests the problem lies both in attitudes to science – especially the distrust of experts and of complexity – and in the attitudes of science – especially its extreme specialisation. There’s a lot in that but I think the problem has deeper roots.

I think climate issues are genuinely hard to absorb and discuss calmly because they demand of us three efforts of cognition that we generally find difficult, that we are not ordinarily good at.

The first is understanding without clarity. We like to know what there is to be known. We like questions to be answered, which means we are mostly interested in answerable questions. The questions we don’t know how to answer generally get put under the heading of mystery, potentially religious. With clear knowledge we can work out where we are going and where it might be better (or worse) to go. But the world of climate change is anything but clear. True, the basic science of greenhouse gases (GHG), global warming and effects on climate is pretty clear. After all, if GHG have an effect on the planet’s warmth, and carbon is the major GHG, and over a century and a half we pump around half a trillion tons of carbon into the atmosphere, you’d sort of expect some sort of effect on planetary warmth, would you not? And the thought that this might have some effect on climates follows easily.

But beyond that it gets pretty murky. Precise climatic effects here or there? Timescale? The cause of this hurricane or that one? Of that drought or this? A great deal cannot be precisely explained let alone accurately predicted. Climate models still have enormous gaps in them and some areas of the world are, inevitably, much less well studied than others for reasons that have nothing to do with the potential seriousness of climate impacts. My personal view is that as science advances, the areas of uncertainty will narrow and the areas of clarity will expand but many relevant questions will continue for a long time to lack definitive and clear clear answers.

And decisions must be made nonetheless.

The second unwelcome effort is to deal with complexity. We like things to be simple. We like life to be straightforward, choices to be clear, cause and effect to be traceable. That way decisions can be made. But the world of climate change is anything but simple. It is all about unexpected side effects, about the inter-action of different causal factors, about the fine balance of things: greenhouse gases are not bad, they are essential to the possibility of human life on this planet – up to a certain level, beyond that, they start to make things difficult. Climate change will make this region much dryer but that one much wetter; it is not affecting the volume of rainfall in this place but rather its timing, so the monsoon seasons comes earlier or later and is shorter or longer, but over there it is not the timing or the volume but the location of the rainfall that is changing.

Beyond the natural effects, the human and social, and thus the economic and political consequences of climate change are even harder to get straight. The social sciences find it hard enough to explain human behaviour and generally demur from predicting it because there are so many variables inter-acting that tracing causation and consequences is exceedingly complicated. For that reason, various branches in several social science disciplines function by using simplified models (of economic behaviour, voting preference, determinants of educational success etc), unfortunately for understanding the social consequences of climate change, these models only work well when they are derived from strong basic data covering a significant period of time and diverse locations. And contemporary climate change has not been around long enough for that kind of research data to build up. So there is no way out of complexity.

And decisions must be made nonetheless.

And thirdly, there is the overwhelming problem of the future. We are generally bad at thinking about the future. There are numerous cliches about politics that essentially add up to saying that what is urgent will always be more persuasive than what is important. It is the sudden shock that gets our attention, not the long-term risk. But it’s true outside politics too. When disaster strikes, recovery happens because for those who survive the disaster there is no other option. But as to prevention – it doesn’t have to happen because a future possibility does not sit as clearly in our minds as a current reality, and because it isn’t imperative, all too often it doesn’t happen. Some may think that modern culture places an historically unprecedented emphasis on the here and now, deferring thoughts about the future until we get there, and casually jettisoning the past as essentially, well, out of date – and if there’s any truth in that, then the difficulty of dealing with the future might be stronger than ever. At just the wrong time.

Systematic thinking about the future happens in risk management and in the insurance industry. But actuarial tables and most management of risk is on the basis of established trends – i.e., they are worked out on the basis of what has happened, revised and kept up to date to cater for latest developments, of course, but heavily shaped by experience. And the trouble here is that the world of climate change is all about the future being different from the past. So even those who are good at thinking about the future – just think how profitable the insurance industry is – are not necessarily so good at thinking about a future re-shaped by climate change.

Stay calm (because nothing else will work)

Faced with this triple challenge to the ways we prefer to know about things, different among us n different ways. Some with denial, some with belief; some with reflection, some by taking a position, some by gauging what others think and taking a view that seems to be respectable (yes, really – it’s why opinion has fashions).

It remains clear that the safe bet is to hedge against climate change by progressively and vigorously shifting to a green economy and by steadily investing in building social resilience of a kind that will make it possible to respond to both the predicted and the un-predicted effects of climate change as it unfolds.

But it is not axiomatic that this is the safe bet, it is simply a reasonable conclusion based on available evidence and the most serious and coherent arguments about that evidence. It is a reasoned conclusion and, to use a familiar parlance, it is a conclusion that is beyond reasonable doubt because it itself permits of doubt.

If further evidence emerges over time on the basis of which it can be argued that this safe bet is no longer necessarily, I will not regret the greening of the economy, which reduces dependence on energy sources that are inherently polluting. And the development of a social resilience will help people, communities and governments to respond creatively to all different sorts of challenges such as conflicts and economic crashes. So the bet remains safe and the right decision even if different evidence emerges.

This means there is no need for quasi-religious fervour among those who acknowledge the reality of global warming and climate change. A lot of that fervour is driven by impatience, by the difficulty of getting the arguments through because of the chaff and the noise and above all the fog created by the general difficulty people have with uncertainty, complexity and the future.

But impatience and frustration like fear and anger offer bad long-term strategies of communication. At its heart, the challenge in the current state of the climate debate is to work out how to refresh the strategy for communicating the need to mitigate and adapt to climate change and the eminent feasibility of doing so. As I wrote in an earlier post, “the path of being responsible about the environment has to be as attractive now as the path of being irresponsible about it” – that is, “Benefit today is what will win the doubters over, not abstract future costs that are avoided.” Doing good for the future, I added, is attractive but does not close the deal alone. A warm and optimistic view of the future will be more persuasive if it has short-term benefit too.

Along with it, a calm and reasoned voice about the issues is essential. It’s enough with all the strident campaigning tones: what we want to hear is a reasoned view of the problem and an optimistic view of the future.

Around the city there were also some particularly crude advertisements using sex to sell booze with the slogan, “Party now, Apologize later.” But that’s another way the conference was not like a party. No-one has apologised. Even though the city encouraged them. One set of posters that went up well before the conference showed world leaders in 2020 apologizing for having failed in Copenhagen in 2009: ageing Obamas, Merkels, Browns et al look down and acknowledge their fault. But there have been no apologies. Instead they have passed the blame.

Let’s try something different. Instead of blame and apology let’s take some time to discuss results, reasons and response. It’s a lengthy discussion that must start now because it’s already time to shake off that hangover.

Results: 1) The Copenhagen Accord

The American singer Tom Paxton had a number about Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro Agnew; so did John Denver, so Google tells me, but I never heard that one. Paxton’s was entitled “The Ballad of Spiro Agnew” and it went as follows: “I’ll sing you a song of Spiro Agnew and all the things he’s done.” Paxton’s slightly perplexed but calm look as he stopped there was priceless every time.

Maybe “The Ballad of what the Copenhagen Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Achieved” would be even shorter: announce title, stay silent.

But it’s worth lingering a second or two over the extraordinary extent, the unplumbable depth of the failure at Copenhagen.

In December 2007, at the Bali climate conference, the parties to the UNFCCC set out on a course that two years later would bring the world a new agreement on reducing global warming and responding to climate change. Earlier this year it became clear that this objective was extremely ambitious. By the beginning of October the prospects of success were dim and in early November it was clear that the conference would fail to achieve that first ambition. With a month to go, therefore, the ambition was scaled down and the idea was a politically binding agreement, whatever that is supposed to mean.

The actual result was that 190 governments plus the EU acknowledged that five of their number – Brazil, China, India, South Africa and the US – had made a statement called “the Copenhagen accord” in which they agreed it would be a good idea if countries would restrain carbon emissions. Some measures were suggested but there was no agreement along the lines of all governments now binding themselves and each other to specific actions. No binding targets were set. Governments are left to carry out their own policies, aiming for carbon emissions to peak as soon as possible. Financial figures are mentioned and a mechanism for spending the money but nothing that is either firm or final.

Results: 2) The climate

Prospects for the global climate and thus for the majority of the world’s population have just got worse.

Climate Action Tracker’s independent estimate of what all the commitments and offers made at and before Copenhagen add up to is that they take the world to a one-in-four chance of exceeding an average temperature increase of 4 degrees centigrade by the end of this century. That is unimaginably bad. The generally accepted target before, at and after Copenhagen is 2 degrees by 2050. The target wanted by small island states and some other developing countries is 1.5 degrees.

Project Catalyst is equally solid and independent. It calculated that, compared to ’business as usual’, an overall reduction in annual emissions of just under 25 per cent was required so as to have an approximately 50:50 chance of being on track for only 2 degrees increase in average global temperature. With many governments making proposals for cutting emissions in a range, it assessed the high end of proposed reductions before Copenhagen as adding up to a cut by 2020 of 15-16 per cent – i.e., almost two-thirds of the way there.

So success in Copenhagen in the original sense – a legally binding deal with specified targets, as foreseen at Bali, getting the world on track for 2 degrees of warming - needed further political commitment and leadership. Short of that, a Copenhagen deal that came in at the high end of pre-conference proposals would be a step in the right direction that would fall tragically short.

However, if only the low end of pre-Copenhagen proposals were to be agreed, the world would be on track for warming above 3 degrees and would find it extremely difficult to make up lost ground after 2020. “One way or another,” they conclude, “a weak deal or no deal in Copenhagen will have severe long-term economic consequences – either through the negative impacts of climate change itself, or through the radical economic dislocations that would be required by 2020 to avoid it.”

And what we got in Copenhagen was no deal.

How thin is the spin?

There simply is no good way to spin this. It is not a breakthrough (Obama), it is not even a good first step (Ban and Brown), (a) because the first step has already been taken at Bali two years ago, and (b) because it involves no forward movement.

A bad way to spin it is to point out as US climate envoy Todd Stern has done that the Copenhagen accord is supported by over 100 countries. Yes, that is, by not much more than 50 per cent of the governments present in Copenhagen. And tellingly, the Financial Times reports that of the five governments that signed the accord, two – Brazil and South Africa – have now disowned it, with Brazil calling it disappointing and South Africa refusing to defend a non-binding agreement.

It is, of course, necessary to look ahead now and see what can be done. And from that point of view, there are some who find the Copenhagen failure encouraging – indeed, two well known figures called for failure beforehand. Both James Hansen and Bjorn Lomborg argued in the immediate aftermath that flat failure in Copenhagen clears the way for new approaches.

While their criticisms of the present approach to climate policy overlap with each other, they are not congruent and their proposals for how to move ahead are also at odds with each other. Their common ground is that both focus on improving the substance of climate change policy. That’s important but if we look at the reason for failure, we’ll see they do not lie in the content of policy.

Reasons

There’s been a lot in the media about reasons for Copenhagen’s failure, with charges being laid at the door of the US for inaction before the conference, and China for being obstructive during it, and the EU for being just generally ineffective.

But the blame game misses the point. Without claiming great clairvoyant qualities for myself, I knew a month before the summit that it would fail and said so in a blog post. Others probably saw it sooner. If I was right not simply by coincidence, that means that what happened in Copenhagen did not cause but, rather, reflected failure.

And what that means is that rather than focus onto whether China really did snub Obama and annoy Merkel, or even whether Obama could have come to Copenhagen with something better in his pocket, we need to look at what went wrong as a whole because the international machinery for dealing with the issue of climate change is broken.

Alex Evans and David Steven have come out with an excellent report, Hitting Reboot: where next for climate after Copenhagen (published by a joint programme of the Brookings Institution and the Center on International Cooperation at New York University), that recommends an approach they characterise as ‘steering into the skid’. In other words, don’t react to faliure by slamming on the brakes. Their detailed proposals are well worth a close look and it is with no disrespect that I say that maybe the best thing about the report is the title: Hitting Reboot.

Rebooting is what you do when everything to do with your hardware and software has gone so badly wrong that you cannot tweak it, you cannot fix it, you cannot really understand it, so you just have to start again.

That’s where we are and the problem at and before Copenhagen is not just that negotiation were handled badly. I want to look at a different diagnosis.

The whole business of bargaining, trade-offs, holding negotiating cards close to your chest, threatening to walk out, interrupting the conference president, raising annoying points of order, haggling over the fine points of an agreement, arranging side meetings to which only a few are invited, pushing close to the deadline so as to limit your counterparts’ room for manoeuvre - all of these and other tactics seen at and before Copenhagen are suitable for negotiating on issues of national interest. I don’t think they can be fruitful when what is at stake is global interest.

If that is right, then although national interests will be different and contradict each other within an overall shared global interest, vesting the whole work of finding a solution in a process that is suitable for only one dimension of the problem is a mistake.

It is also a problem with negotiations that the one who is prepared to hold out against an agreement for longest and create the most problems for a smooth process is often likely to get the deal that is closest what s/he wants.

The urge to compromise with spoilers in order to get them into the fold of the agreement means that even a determined majority may find they are moving the terms of the agreement towards the preference of the hold-outs. In many cases that does not matter but in the case of climate change it does matter a great deal. Compromising on temperature rise of 2.5 degrees in order to allow a heavy emitter to sign up would essentially destroy the point of the agreement.

Again, therefore, the negotiation process could itself be a key part of the problem.  Its deficiencies have to be addressed if worthwhile ways forward are to be found.

Response

What is needed is a strategy to address the core problem of the hold-outs – governments holding out against an ambitious climate deal, even if it is fair, because they see it as restricting their own national economic development; compromising with the hold-outs risks changing a good agreement into a bad one.

The best solution to the problem of hold-outs is for there to be no hold-outs. For this reason, an essential part of any strategy for moving forward after Copenhagen is to keep on making and winning the argument about climate change as a real, current, solvable problem.

The argument is made not only through articles, books, blogs, conversation, feature films and TV programmes that deploy evidence and reason (and not, by the way, a quasi-religious and alienating fervour). It is also made through the practical actions and commitments of ordinary people, through a growing movement that understands and wants to respond creatively to the challenge of climate change, and which develops that response as individuals and through the institutions in which they are active – schools, companies, political parties, governments, etc.

But we must also accept that the argument is not going to be won everywhere simply as a matter of principle and conviction. There is considerable scepticism in some very important quarters and there is a need to develop a strategy for that. Copenhagen has shown that the hold-out problem is pressing. Persuasion is important but something more hard-nosed is also required.

When things are this serious, radical approaches are well worth a close look. In that spirit, let me float a two-part proposal for discussion. The appropriate body to take up this proposal is the European Union as the new External Action Service gets established. Part 1 of the proposal deals with process; Part 2 with substance.

1: Process: problem-solving instead of negotiation

Adversaries negotiate. For adversaries, the alternatives to negotiating are on a spectrum that goes from silence through non-cooperation to insult and conflict of varying degrees of openness. Actors who do not see themselves as adversaries - whether they are individuals or governments or any other entity – can get together and discuss problems in different formats. These have long since passed from being interesting notions, through experimentation, to routine use in a variety of different settings ranging from inter-personal disputes to international relations.

The problem-solving format works when participants see themselves as having a problem to solve, and their conflict as part of that problem, even the whole of it, rather than seeing themselves purely as adversaries.

In the climate context, the aim of a problem-solving approach is to bring together enough players of enough economic weight, with enough commitment to an ambitiuus climate agreement and enough sense of their own common ground, so that they can explore the possibilities, the problems, the connections, and the prospects for cutting through the knots of complexity to a deal.

Exploring this through a problem-solving approach rather than in a negotiation means they will be working together for a solution rather than competing for advantage. Nonetheless, those governments that take up a problem-solving approach would not thereby have to quite the negotiations.

With the common ground, there is a chance that there will be the open-mindedness required to explore ideas and identify solutions. With the economic weight, there is a chance that the process would become attractive for other governments not initially committed to this way of doing things. It requires a critical mass to get started.

There are a number of governments whose weight and policy record on climate suggests they could start things rolling – for example, the EU, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Mexico, Norway, South Korea. These together account for a little less than half of world economic output. Were it possible as the process unfolded also to attract the US, the combined economic weight of the climate problem-solvers would be just on 70 per cent of world output. And there would be many others that would also want to join in, both as a matter of principle and so as not to be left out.

Intermission: what would the status of this be?

When the problem-solvers have arrived at a solution that they agree will work, they should agree it and begin implementation. The obvious objection is that that would mean powerful players were not part of the agreement. How could this work? What would the status of the agreement be?

At one level, the answer is straightforward: states can and do bind themselves in treaty arrangements that are not universal. But the legal issue is not the point here; it’s the political issue.

Further, if a number of states arrive at an agreement through a problem-solving approach, that does not preclude them from also signing up to a universal treaty arrived at by negotiation, if the outcome of the negotiations is satisfactory.

It has been an unquestioned assumption of climate change policy that since the problem is global, so must the solution be, and since the solution must be global, so must the process be. The experience of Copenhagen suggests to me that we can and must examine that assumption.

So the question that is actually being asked here is, How might it be possible for an agreement to be meaningful if it is arrived at by a process that might leave, for example, China, India and Russia standing outside its scope?

The answer is: by making it attractive for China, India, Russia and other countries to come inside its scope without letting it be possible for them to play a hold-out role.

2: Substance: green trade and investment

The substance of climate policy at present is to focus on cutting greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the negative changes that will unfold until emission-cuts have their desired effects. There are various criticisms of this approach and how it is implemented. Lomborg says it is impossible because the world is wedded to fossil fuels so huge investment is required in carbon-neutral technologies. Hansen says the fossil fuel addiction cannot be broken through carbon trading and instead proposes a fee to reflect the full social costs of the use of fossil fuels.

Along with all that, there is a further problem in the basic discourse of cutting emissions – it means doing less. It sounds economically unattractive especially in a recession and its after-effects. It sounds like loss.

Problem-solving might therefore start by recognising that the path of being responsible about the environment has to be as attractive now as the path of being irresponsible about it.

Benefit today is what will win the doubters over, not abstract future costs that are avoided. Doing good for the future is an added attraction for most people, at least in practice. Deferring the fulfilment of self-interest in the name of virtue is much less effective as a strategy than getting virtue and current self-interest to go hand in hand. Climate policy should have no sense of self-sacrifice nor of deferred benefits. The cosmetic appearance of climate change policy is in this sense as important as the substance.

So while there has to be a rigourous programme for cutting emissions, there also has to be a programme for economic growth, jobs and improvement in the quality of life. This means properly investing in green technologies, especially in transport, energy and construction.

This investment needs to be both in what are now called mitigation technologies (reducing greenhouse gas emissions) and adaptation (dealing with the impact of unavoidable climate change). There is considerable crossover between them, for example, by investing in infrastructure, which can and should have adaptation in-built and using green technologies from design through construction to use.

The climate problem-solvers, representing at least 45 per cent of world economic output and possibly 70 per cent if the US participates, can generate an enormous market for this investment. Green infrastructure, energy and transport can be financed through joint stock companies, with government support all the way through the life of the project, starting from government funding for basic research, through to tax support for start-ups and continuing tax incentives. This combined climate and economic policy arrangement is the way to get sustainable progress on a low carbon pathway.

With the scale of this market, there would be strong reasons for developing countries, especially those with ultra-strong export-led growth, to come into the arrangement unless they could free-ride on it. The way to stop free-riding is by legislating tariffs on international trade that are set aside for countries that have signed up to the package of green growth and cuts in emissions. Stay outside it and, of course, trade can and will still happen but the commodities of the countries outside the system will move at a somewhat higher cost regardless of how green the individual commodities are.

Countries that want a less ambitious climate deal than is required for global well-being – or, to be ultra-fair, less ambitious than countries such as the EU believe is required for global well-being – would calculate for themselves the relative costs of being in the system and being outside it.

The income from the duties on non-green trade can be used, alongside the Tobin tax on international financial trade, and together with government spending funded by taxes in the richer countries of the world, to fund adaptation to the impact of climate change.

Where the devil lurks

I am not presenting this as the finished idea. This is a bare outline, to see if makes sense. If it does there is an ocean of detail and links to other questions to attend to, not least

• the delicate balance between climate policies and other aspects of international relations,
• the need to generate green industrial investment at home,
• the nature of the institutions required to establish and monitor implementation of this arrangement.

But proposals for moving ahead after Copenhagen have to have this level of ambition. Just trying to do more or less the same thing better next time round is all too likely to fail for the same reasons as this time and could well fail worse. As bad as it is to have no agreement it will indeed be worse to have an agreement that compromises too far with the hold-outs and sets inadequate targets.

The attraction of this approach is that it includes

• a mechanism for getting a better agreement than looks likely to come out of negotiations on the lines of Copenhagen,
• a combination of task (cut emissions) and benefit (growth and adaptation) that adds up to a more attractive deal than the package of cuts plus adaptation that has been negotiated hitherto,
• because of the benefits, the possibility of implementing without waiting for all governments to sign up,
• and the potential for the arrangement to attract countries than are initially uninvolved because of the economic benefits.

So is Copenhagen not the time to seal a new climate deal after all? Is it time for a re-think? My own view is that it’s best never to stop thinking, then you don’t have to make the effort to start up again.

Calling for failure when failure is a given

James Hansen, who did more than any other individual 20 years ago to get the issue onto the world’s agenda, has said it would be better for the conference to fail. Anything it can achieve, he argues (Audio of Hansen\’s Guardian interview), will be so badly flawed as to be counter-productive – worse than useless. A very different kind of voice expresses a conclusion along the same lines: Bjørn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and  author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, also argues that a fiasco in Copenhagen would be the best thing for the global climate.

First things first: the last minute opti-spin of politicians saying that a deal in Copenhagen is still possible and the urgent insistence of mass rallies that a new and ambitious climate treaty is necessary should not distract us from a simple but unpleasant recognition: compared to the original goal of getting agreement on a treaty to replace and improve upon the Kyoto Protocol, the Copenhagen gathering will indeed fail.

There will be a political deal at most. Some leaders, some commentators and some activists will say the deal is binding, which might be a moral truth but will be a legal fiction. Political commitments can be laid aside either because the issue is in the hands of a new government or just because it is convenient.

So Copenhagen is not the endpoint and both hopes and fears that it is are somewhat overblown; arguments for failure, therefore, are really arguments for continuing the discussion.

Hansen and Lomborg

Hansen and Lomborg have completely different positions and standings in the climate debate. Hansen is a heavyweight who insisted on energetically disseminating the conclusions of scientific research at a time when the world did not want to hear it and the weight of established scientific opinion was against him. Thirty or forty years ago, the settled view was that climates do not change quickly. That he succeeded in getting a proper hearing was the result of his dedication and determination to carry through on a major act of public service.

By contrast, Lomborg is a gadfly with a talent for getting publicity, who courts controversy, some of it around his ideas but much of it around his use of evidence, and who is often worth listening to because what he says is not all stupid.

Hansen has become more radical and in some ways more public in his views and his articulation of them; it is, apparently, the Bush administration in particular that pushed him towards more vocal and radical stances over climate policy. He believes that world leaders are wedded to preserving as much of “business as usual” as possible and that the emphasis on reducing CO2 emissions by carbon trading is bound to fail. Lomborg likewise argues that the current approach to mitigation is an expensive non-runner. Better, he says, to invest in adapting to climate change now and in long-term green energy technology.

Thus, there is both some compatibility and major divergences between the arguments that Hansen and Lomborg separately advance. From my perspective, Lomborg is too complacent about the need for mitigation but right about putting emphasis both on adaptation and on long-term green investment, while Hansen is right about mitigation and about the enormous risk of relying on carbon trading as a major instrument for reducing CO2 emissions, but strangely silent on adaptation.

But there is something else that they have in common with each other and with the dominant way in which climate issues are debated. There’s too much thinking in boxes.

The conflict and peace dimension – the reason for thinking outside the box

In some small circles, discussions about the right policy responses to climate change are slowly starting to acknowledge that they have to address the implications of climate change for conflict and security. It is now reasonably widely accepted, as International Alert argued in a report I co-authored two years ago that there is a subtle, complex and real linkage between climate change and conflict and that the knock-on consequences of climate change interact with other economic, political and social factors to increase the risk of violent conflict and political instability.

But this insight has not yet filtered into the design of the policy response. As exemplified in the build-up to Copenhagen, the issue is in the hands of climate experts (because it’s about climate) and lawyers (because it’s about a treaty) with some diplomats (because inter-state negotiations are unfolding), but not in the hands of experts in peacebuilding, development or governance – even though it’s about all those things too.

A new report from International Alert, Climate Change, Conflict and Fragility, was launched last week. In a way our sub-title says it all: Understanding the linkages, shaping effective responses. If we – the world – are unable to come up with policy responses that address the linkages between climate change, conflict, development, government, human rights, trade and the world economy – if we cannot find good and effective ways of addressing the linkages, then policy responses are going to fail.

Because the treaty that will not be agreed at Copenhagen treats the reduction of CO2 emissions and the tasks of adapting to unavoidable climate change as technical tasks that are not linked to other major problems of peace, development and the economy, I have a degree of sympathy with both James Hansen and Bjørn Lomborg in their calls for failure. At least, the non-securing of a treaty in Copenhagen makes it possible that when the treaty is finalised it will include some steps – or some articles in it that facilitate steps – towards dealing with these troublesome linkages.

There are five main recommendations in the International Alert report for shaping an effective response:

1. Ensure that climate adaptation is conflict-sensitive.
2. Likewise but on the other side of the coin, make sure peacebuilding is climate-proofed.
3. Back that up by ensuring that shifts towards a low carbon economy are supportive of development and peace (no more egregious errors like the hasty shift into biofuels).
4. Strengthen the capacity for risk management and information handling in developing countries.
5. Support developing countries in preparing to cope peacefully with climate-induced increases in migration; here, as at other points in the necessary policies, what is required is readiness for social adaptation to the social challenges climate change may generate.

In addition the report argues that

1. Institutions responsible for adapting to climate change, whether at local or national or regional or global level, must be structured and staffed in a way that reflects the specific challenges of the climate-conflict linkages, especially the need to respond to unforeseen events.
2. National development strategies henceforth along with international development assistance must integrate peaceful adaptation to climate change into their planning and implementation.
3. There is an urgent need for a large scale, comprehensive study of the likely costs of adaptation, including the social and political dimensions along with those economic sectors that have thus far been left out of the cost estimates.

Linkage, linkage, linkage

A masterly overview in the Daily Telegraph by Geoffrey Lean on 5th December showed how the debate on climate science has moved over two centuries and especially over the last two to three decades and outlined where the areas of dispute remain. The article appears in a conservative newspaper, a majority of whose readers according to surveys do not accept that global warming is happening, is anthropogenic and is generating climate change. That is exactly where such articles – thoughtful, open-minded, rigourous, calm and authoritative – need to be published. Next stop, Wall Street Journal.

But once the scientific argument is won so that the overwhelming majority understands that there is a problem and something both must and can be done about it, then there is the need to win the argument about what that “something” is.

And at that point two nasty but necessary thoughts occur:

Climate is not only a climate issue. So it needs to get out of the hands of the climate experts. Or, at least, out of their monopoly control. Climate is a social, economic and political issue as well as environmental. From now on, let us undertake to respect those linkages.

We have to persuade people to shape policy responses without knowing exactly what those responses have to be. Exactly how climate will change, at what speed, with precisely what impacts still remains uncertain. Multiply that uncertainty by a very large but unknown quantity and you start to gauge the piled-up uncertainty about the social and political consequences. So exactly what needs to be done is not clear. We have to explore and advocate at the same time. It is a new way of doing politics and a new way of advocacy for a problem the world has thus far shown that it does not know how to handle.

It would be surprising if new forms of politics and modes of advocacy were not required.

The arguments are not over and the issue is in no way at an endpoint. Consensus about what to do is even further way than consensus about the problem. Both are necessary. Whatever happens these next two weeks at Copenhagen, the main conclusion is we shall keep thinking and keep arguing.

The risks of imprecision

There are three basic issues at stake in the need for this precision. They all hinge round the precarious state of debate on climate change at present. Denying the reality of climate change so far and its likelihood into the future has become an article of faith for some very vocal people. Putting up arguments that are difficult to sustain is an unwise strategy.

The particular risks in the security, conflict and peace dimension of the issue seem to me to be:

• First, security fears can mobilise people but apocalyptic scenarios demobilise, especially when on closer examination they turn out not to justified by the evidence.
• Second, treating the conflict and security issues as if they will produce direct threats from one country against another, or even one group against another, which is the language of military security will distort the debate and the policy response; at worst, the response will be militarised, inappropriate and wasteful.
• And third, basing the argument on an over-simplified linkage could generate policies that miss their targets in other ways and simply lead to confusion and uncertainty about what the problem is and why anyone should care.

No simple cause-and-effect

There is little point in even trying to base policy on a straightforward cause-and-effect relationship between climate change and violent conflict or political instability. To begin with, there is a striking lack of research findings on the topic. What there is does not offer robust conclusions. Nor are there reliable findings about parallel linkages between conflict and other environmental changes (such as deforestation or deteriorating freshwater supply) that could be used to make a proxy argument about climate change.

And there are some good reasons for this lack of a ready made body of research findings, reasons that taken together tell us not to put much energy into looking for a neat cause-and-effect explanation.

• First, the evidence base is necessarily weak; there has been too little time since the effects of climate change began to make themselves felt for adequate research data to have accumulated of the kind needed for large-scale quantitative studies that can reliably depict trends. It seems likely that there will always be methodological difficulties in completing such studies because, at present, the state of knowledge in the natural sciences does not let us attribute a specific event such as a hurricane or typhoon to climate change. Trends in frequency and intensity of natural events will form a relatively soft foundation in a potential database on conflict and climate. Similarly, the slow onset changes in climate such as changes in growing seasons and more extensive droughts do not easily lend themselves to use in a large scale quantitative study.
• Second, given these problems in constructing large scale studies of trends over time, there is a case for turning instead to case studies. These, however, while individually suggestive, do not offer much by way of establishing causal connections except against a reasonably well established quantitative background, which brings us back to the first problem.
• Third and, in my view, most importantly, causality is always complex. Normally, armed conflicts not only have several different causes but several different types of causes. These are often conflated, obliterating the differences between background or root causes (e.g., regional poverty and a history of discrimination), the aims of the conflict parties (e.g., secession or national power), the immediate trigger (e.g., the assassination of a respected leader of a minority group or increased world food prices), and influences on how the conflict is fought out (e.g., ‘blood diamonds’ or other illicit trade, or the role of the UN or regional powers). The fact is that simple cause-and-effect is rarely if ever enough to explain the genesis of violent conflict.

Faced with all of this, the very sparse research literature on the theme contains some that happily declares that no link can be proven, earning approving reference from climate change sceptics. But the fact that no link can be proven is not the same as saying none exists. And the real limitation of positivist social science approaches is that, bound by evidence, they necessarily work by reflection on the past – whereas the key point to understand about climate change is that the future will be different from the past.

The complex causes of Darfur

The tragedy in Darfur during this decade has often been attributed to climate change. In fact, the conflict and the scale of the tragedy exemplify the complexity of causation and the importance of understanding how different factors interact and jointly lead to conflict.

Satisfactorily explaining the violence in Darfur necessitates reference to a wide range of factors including historical grievance, local perceptions of racial difference, group power dynamics in the region, the proliferation of small arms in the context of long-lasting civil war in Sudan, the weakness of state institutions and the arbitrary way in which power is taken, held and wielded, and decades of disputes and violent conflicts between pastoralists (herders) and agriculturalists (settled farmers) over access to and control of fertile land fresh water. An analytical narrative must also include the impact of 20 years of drought, placing this alongside the political and economic marginalisation of the area. Such an analysis needs to explain how these factors interacted to destroy so many lives and cause so much misery.

Interaction and risk

In short, what is necessary in order to understand the conflict dimension of climate change is to understand how the pressures of climate change interact with other features of a country’s social, economic and political landscape to increase conflict risk. Absent climate change, those other features of the national landscape also generate risk of violent conflict and could lead its eruption; climate change makes a bad problem worse.

The uncomfortable fact is that many countries – especially in Africa but also in other regions – are already at the brink of failure in the fulfilment of basic needs such as food, water, shelter and, above all, peace and stability. Climate change will generate pressures on already weak systems of government and perhaps push them over the edge. The pressures will be transmitted via linking mechanisms such as harvest failures and food insecurity, depletion of fresh water supplies, migration from non-viable areas to locales that are barely viable. These pressures will produce conflict and a state whose capacity is weak and whose authority is arbitrary will be unable to contain those conflicts except through coercion, likely generating a responding violence and leading to sharp conflict escalation.

This scenario is not inevitable in any one place but is, rather, a generic risk across the board of fragile and conflict-affected states.

Policy

Faced with a problem based on risk and interaction of different factors, the appropriate policy response is risk management by addressing the inter-linkages. The issue in Nepal, for example, is not floods alone, but floods and the difficulty the government has in generating an adequate level of preparedness for and resilience against the impact of predictable flooding. The response is not only to put improved flood preparations in place but to develop greater capacity in government and greater trust between government and governed – between the authorities and the people. And Nepal is not unique in this regard.

Even more when we look at issues such as migration from areas made non-viable by climate change, the response cannot be developed in purely technical terms. There is an enormous task of information dissemination, sensitive awareness raising about shared problems, exploration of what problems could be generated if migrants move into a given area, and an imaginative search for creative solutions to problems that the discussion identifies.

Adaptation to climate change is always social; sometimes climate change generates a need for social adaptation to a new and largely social development, such as migration, but potentially also others such as the need to learn new skills for new types of farming or altogether new skills.

Local

The further issue to be considered here is that this response cannot be up to the task if it is centrally generated, dictated and owned – and far less if it is generated, dictated and owned by an international body. Adaptation to climate change will be local or it will not happen.

It is at local level – in villages, towns, provinces, neighbourhoods – that the interaction of the different risk factors will be addressed. It is there, locally owned, that effective interventions will be made to break the perilous linkages. Of course, that local action must also be coordinated within a national framework of policy and it will often need to be internationally supported with money, hardware, skills and knowledge.

Local action, coordinated by national policy, internationally resourced as necessary.

The basic idea is a tax on each international financial transaction. James Tobin’s original notion was to use the tax as one way to moderate financial speculation after the value of the US dollar was de-linked from gold in 1971. He first proposed a 1 per cent tax. After a time he modified his suggestion to a level of between 0.1 and 0.25 per cent. Today, in some treatments (such as by the UK Trades Union Congress and in a study by the Austrian government) the level is put at 0.05 per cent - i.e., one two-thousandth of the value of the transaction.

To begin with, the aim was to slow down the pace of transactions in the international financial system. It would do that by deterring quick speculative trades. But that’s not on the horizon at 0.5 per cent; nowadays, the key attraction is that it will raise money.

Since unimaginably large sums of money are changing hands in currency speculation each hour, even a tiny fraction of the annual total is very big. A 0.05% tax on UK financial transactions would raise between £30 billion and £100 billion a year. The higher number is from the Austrian study and is the estimated revenue even if the overall value of transactions fell by two-thirds from pre-crunch levels.

So there goes the budget deficit and here comes money to cover the bill for adaptation to climate change in developing countries. A 50-50 split? – why not?

Arguments against are pretty weedy. The knee-jerk reaction from the City – omigod it’ll destroy London – is so over the top , it makes you weep. A tax of 0.05 per cent is not going to destroy London. If the banks are that worried, they could reduce the very high commission fees they charge by one two-thousandth of total transaction costs. They wouldn’t notice the difference.

And the banking world should probably be a bit careful exactly how they make the argument. Except for bankers themselves, nobody thinks they are so very wonderful any more.  Many bankers seem to have shrugged off any sense of responsibility for the crash of their sector and the consequences, and are happily greeting the return of good times and big bonuses. The rest of the world has not so easily forgotten. Today, the proposition that if some banking activities were to leave London, that would be good for the country and, indeed, good for the City itself is a notion that many people would find worthy of further discussion.

In case the idea of a 0.05% tax ushering in disaster fails to convince, the next objection is that taxing per transaction is not technically feasible. Rubbish – all transactions are logged electronically; the tax can be levied per transaction, or per hour, or per day. It wouldn’t be hard to deduct 0.05% of the value automatically as soon as (in the same few seconds as) the transaction is finalised.

So having tried to have it both ways by claiming that the Tobin tax is either damaging or impossible, the last objection is a bit more serious. The argument is that the tax is not practicable unless everybody does it everywhere.

A bit more serious – but far from convincing. The first question is whether everybody really does have to do it in order for it work? I think not. Were the EU to agree to do it, that would probably be enough for a critical mass. Yes, some companies might shift operations out of the EU’s jurisdiction, such as to Switzerland where some hedge funds are already re-locating some parts of their staffs previously based in London, or to the US or Asia. But the EU is so big in world trade that there would still be masses of money to be made even with a 1/2000 tax. Bankers would moan but governments outside the EU would soon be looking enviously at the revenues rolling in. They would be much more likely to follow suit than not.

So then, might the EU take the tax up? France and Germany already back it as does Austria. Elsewhere support is not uniform but the UK could offer to allocate, say, 0.005% (one twenty-thousandth) to the EU regional development funds as a sweetener and the other financial centres could follow suit.

So that about wraps up the objections. Another one (sort of) came from the Canadian finance minister who said that in his country they want to lower tax not raise it. Yes but most of that discussion is about direct tax on incomes or indirect tax on sales. This is neither. And in many governments, while raising taxes is not the only way to increase revenue, increased revenue is indeed needed in a big way so as to pay down debt and reduce budget deficits. And though the US administration was reported by the Brown-hating UK press as having slapped the proposal down, that is not actually what was said and not what has happened so far.

Arguments for are pretty obvious. With a barely noticeable effect on the level of activity in the financial marketplace, the revenue rolls in. The more governments that do it the better. There is money to pay off the effects of the recession, invest in adaptation to climate change in developing countries, use on other good purposes, and some to lay aside for a future rainy day so the next time the banking sector does a crash and burn spectacular, the emergency rescue doesn’t impose a heavy burden on national finances and tax-paying citizens.

There are three particularly attractive elements here – and a fourth element that I am sure is attractive to Gordon Brown and his advisers.

1. This is bonus revenue: it will not affect economic activity throughout a country in the way that sales, income, payroll, property or corporate taxes do. So it can be used for things that haven’t previously been understood to be necessary.

2. It is therefore ideal as a way of paying for climate change: I have blogged before on the ill-understood enormity of the bill for adaptation to climate change. One thing I have never understood in the debate about how to finance adaptation has been the emphasis on using carbon trading or other proposals such as a tax on airline and shipping fuels. It’s as if the climate question is a system and you want revenue and expenditure to be all within the system – like a road tax or toll charges that are only used to pay for upkeep of the roads. I see no reason to limit the sources of revenue in that way because I very much doubt that carbon trading will ever raise enough to meet the bills. The one visible attraction of keeping the financing mechanism within the climate system is that it is then cost neutral for taxpayers – but that’s hardly a decisive argument if it doesn’t produce enough money.

And now here with the Tobin tax is an alternative – no burden on the ordinary tax-payer and able to raise more money, more transparently and more efficiently than carbon trading. (That doesn’t mean there is no advantage in carbon trading; we should do it and use the revenue from it but we don’t have to depend on it as the prime source of financing for adaptation.)

3. And it will reconstruct the relationship between the banking sector and citizens because we will at last all see some real social utility in the sector.

And the fourth specifically Gordon Brown type reason is that he has come up with it before the Conservatives. It’s a neat bit of intra-UK politics. If the Conservatives oppose this tax, they will be vulnerable to the charge that they are cosying up to their friends in the City; on the other hand, agreeing to the tax will mean the Conservatives following Labour’s lead on an important economic question. There will be a way out of this conundrum; in politics there always is. But for the moment, this easily understood tax could let Brown put the Conservatives on the back foot on a couple of big issues.

But it is not all benefit; there are hidden costs. Exactly the feature of the tax that is so appealing is also a downside: it’s easy money. When governments are not accountable to taxpayers for their state income (e.g., when there are huge oil royalties), they are very often not accountable to their citizens for anything. It wouldn’t go that far in the UK but the very ease of securing the additional revenue might lead to irresponsible behaviour.

The most likely form of irresponsibility in a democracy is to spend too much too quickly. Watch how Norway uses its oil revenue. Very little is used for current spending; when I was living there I remember a newspaper reporting that oil’s contribution to current expenditure in that year’s budget (2002) was equivalent to one hour’s pumping time. But successive governments have had quite difficult case to make that oil money should not be used for today but rather hoarded for tomorrow. Plenty of voters can accept the argument that it would be OK to spend just a bit. But they are Norwegians and very responsible and sober so they don’t ultimately vote on the basis of that temptation. In other countries, voters might not be so social-democratic in their approach or so Lutheran.

It is easy to foresee the Tobin tax being regarded as a cornucopia by every good cause and special interest.

• The political cost of the Tobin tax could be the ultimate market-isation of the political process. Forget values and ideology; the whole thing will be about dishing out the money. 
• Meanwhile the social cost could be felt in the deepening inertia of social movements; why bother volunteering to help with anything when the government can crank out another Tobillion or two to address any problem. And wait for the backlash from those social groups that lose out in the shell-out because they lack the networks and articulacy with which to get their point across.
• And the economic cost could  be stagflation – inflation from spending too much too quickly on too many projects, or from a populist reduction in personal taxation, and stagnation out of what used to be called ‘Dutch disease’ because of the deadening impact of natural gas revenues on the Dutch economy in the 1970s and 1980s.

The prospect of some or all of these negative consequences of adopting the Tobin tax is, to my mind, a significant risk and the most serious objection to it. Fortunately, I think there is – at least for the EU – a fairly straightforward solution.

Simply lock agreed spending priorities in place through legislation. In the EU, legislation once agreed and absorbed in the acquis communautaire is not easily changed. A multi-national, multi-actor, multi-government agreement is by definition harder to shift than the decision one parliament took last year. This would lead to a good, solid debate about what the priorities should be; then they get carved in stone.

For individual governments it may be harder to have this degree of confidence that a Tobin tax could provide its benefits of increased efficient revenues without serious side-effects. For that reason, it might be best for the whole package to be locked in through international agreement.

The G20 could take the lead in putting it together. Thus, despite their surprise on 7 November, Gordon Brown chose exactly right in putting the idea to the meeting of G20 finance ministers that weekend. Shame the ground wasn’t prepared better but that’s Brown’s way and once the idea is out there, it’s out there and we can all have a think about it.

So, what do we reckon for spending priorities? Given the extraordinary costs of the banking bail-out, and the urgent need to get big money into funding adaptation I go for three:

• One-third of revenue to bring down budget deficits and pay off national debt;
• one-third to put aside in a special fund in case the banking sector crashes again;
• and one-third to contribute to meeting the costs of adaptation to climate change in developing countries.

One last point: If there is extra insurance for future failure by the banking sector, that needs to be matched by increased monitoring and control of the sector’s performance. It is often said that when car safety belts became mandatory in the UK, drivers felt safer and enough drove faster so the number of deaths in motor accidents remained about the same. Insurance to cover banks’ failures could perversely release more irresponsibility by the banking sector. Thus the need for more monitoring and control, which could also be paid for out of the one-third of Tobin revenues devoted to protecting ordinary people from banking failure.

There’s undoubtedly a whole lot to be said about what has happened, why and what is the way forward. And it needs to be said and knocked back and forth so that we move on in better shape. Those who have been close to the process need to sort out what they think and articulate it so conclusions can be weighed and lessons learned. For myself, a distant observer, I have three points to make under each of those three headings – what, why and looking ahead.

What happened

1. Even a few months ago, expectations were not being massaged this low. What was being mooted was a framework agreement, an initial agreement just leaving some details to sort out. Perhaps to carry on with the negotiating slog you have to ignore the increasingly unfavourable political environment and the mountain ranges of disagreement, uncertainty and misunderstanding that have to be climbed, and simply maintain a degree of wilful optimism. But if we are to know where we stand, we need to agree on one thing at least: this is bad. It is not a zero point but there is a huge amount of work to do.

Even coming to a politically binding agreement in Copenhagen, which is the height of today’s vestigial ambitions, is itself a huge task. The risk is that to get political agreement, the outcome from Copenhagen will be a series of fudges and compromises that can be spun in any direction by the principals, so that all the old terrain of 2009 will have to be traversed again next year in the lead-up to the next Conference of Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, due in Mexico City in December 2010.

In other words, a cosmetic agreement in Copenhagen may do more harm than good. But a complete absence of agreement will be even worse.

2. But can somebody tell me what a politically binding agreement is? I think it’s an agreement politicians come to. Looking for examples of agreements and commitments made and broken by politicians, I came across so many I turned to Wikpedia, which laconically notes, ‘There are strong pressures on politicians to make promises which they cannot keep.’

3. So agreement at Mexico City is not in the bag. It is all very well for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to declare that the climate issue is so urgent that the world cannot wait a year for agreement but the sad fact is that, seen in today’s perspective, it is going to take a lot of work to get agreement in one year’s time at the Mexico City COP. Neither the content of a political agreement at Copenhagen nor its durability can be taken for granted.

The likelihood of fudge and spin at and after Copenhagen leads to a fairly simple equation:

• the better and more far-reaching that the terms of an agreement in Copenhagen are, the less durable the agreement will be;
• contrariwise, the more durable it is, the emptier it will be.

Finding the right balance is going to be horribly difficult.

Why it happened

Everybody will have their theory; as indicated above, I have three for today:

1. The idiocy of the Bush administration: ’nuff said – always good to blame the Bushies and they were a genuine obstacle on the road to agreement. If the world’s biggest carbon emitter would not join in, there was no hope of an agreement.

2. There was a lot of hiding behind the idiocy of the Bush administration. The extent of the Bushies lack of intelligence, competence and integrity on the issue of climate change masked a whole lot of other problems. These include

• the genuine complexity of negotiating a new climate agreement – a jig-saw puzzle whose entirety is understood by hardly any (if any at all) of the negotiators;
• the reluctance of other leading players to step up, including not only China and India but also many EU states as recent negotiations have shown;
• the divisions between many participants – there is no unified negotiating bloc to be found anywhere;
• the contrast between the focus in the rich world on mitigation and the focus in the developing world on adaptation, which permits a political bargain to be struck, subject to detailed terms being worked out, but makes an inclusive legally binding treaty a much tougher prospect.

3. As a result, there is an incentive to be negative. We have arrived at a situation where those who wish to have no treaty can impose a high price for their reluctant and provisional acquiescence. It is a common situation in negotiations and, for example, consistently bedevils peace settlements. But with the climate change negotiations, there are so many negative voices and votes, competing with each other to get the best inducement for signing up, that a perverse incentive has emerged, in which even those who most genuinely want or need a treaty are tempted to meet their interests by playing a blocking game.

Playing your cards close to your chest is standard negotiating tactics; threatening to tip the table over is reserved for crunch moments in high stakes games; right now, half the key players seem to be actually walking out or tempted by it. Easy to sympathise with from a human point of view, and an understandable negotiating tactic, it is self-defeating when it becomes a trend.

And the way forward

Once again, three thoughts, in the expectation that there are many more to get out into open discussion:

1. The arguments still need to be won. And they need to be won in a way that breaks down the political polarisation surrounding the issue – most notably but not exclusively in the US – and that gets away from the pseudo-religious air that surrounds it. In other words, further re-articulation is needed of the dispassionate and scientific arguments that show that climate change is happening, and which permit of the actual uncertainty that surrounds the science of climate change, let alone our understanding of the social consequences, and allow people to explore the dimensions of likely change and relate it to their own core concerns both in and outside of politics.

This is a bad time to be making that sort of argument in the UK. A court judgement here has just equated concern about one’s carbon footprint with religious belief,* which is a genuine step in the wrong direction. The aura of religion and belief around environmental issues has long obstructed a clear understanding of them, and the work of zealots tempted into a modern secular equivalent of a medieval religious fanatic’s hair shirt has been a definitive turn-off for many who would otherwise be interested. Meantime, the government has just sacked a scientific adviser whose advice on drugs it didn’t like.

So there are strong odds against getting the tone of the discussion right. We need to persist in trying.

For some, a properly balanced case on the increase in risk of conflict and insecurity as a knock-on consequence of climate change may offer a route away from the personalised politics of individual environmentalism, which I think leads into the zone of quasi-religious fervour, and a route into facing up to how to manage and mitigate natural, economic, social and political risk.

2. Sort out the adaptation issue. Money – huge amounts – see earlier posts on this – money needs to be put on the table to get an agreement. But how adaptation is done is going to be as important as how much money is spent on it. The fine details matters at least as much as the big picture. If that issue can be got across, it could even be the case that deferring from Copenhagen to Mexico City would offer some benefit to set against the cost of one year’s delay.

3. Don’t stop negotiating. Obvious really but taking the foot off the gas right now (sorry, wrong metaphor) would be a perilous mistake.

* An employee refused to take a flight to pick up his boss’s Blackberry because it was against his principles to enlarge his carbon footprint needlessly. He was sacked. He is suing for unfair dismissal. The court judgement says he can sue on the same basis as if the boss had asked him to do something against his religious beliefs. I would have thought that a better defence is that his boss was an absent-minded git who would benefit by having to live without his Crackberry for a couple of days.