2008 UNFCCC conference in Poznan.
[Image © copyright Oxfam International, some rights reserved]

COP 15 is going to have some people crying from the rooftops that this meeting decides the fate of all humanity and others sniping about another pointless UN junket. The truth is that this meeting does matter - a great deal - but it needs to be put in perspective. This is a significant moment in the development of an international political process that started in the early 1990s, and is set to go on for many years into the future. The Copenhagen meeting aims to set the next bundle of targets, timetables and mechanisms when those outlined in the Kyoto deal of 1997 run their course in 2012.

Many things are different this time around. International climate politics is more complex but also more mature. It is no longer simply a matter of the rich North admitting 'mea culpa' and obsessing about mitigating their own emissions and funnelling some 'clean tech' cash to the developing world. The booming manufacturers and sprouting middle classes of the developing world giants of India and China have made them major CO2 polluters. Political leaders and publics in the South are also much more aware of the potentially huge consequences of climate change for their societies.

Things have moved on in the North too. Levels of awareness of the science have increased, but along with this an awareness of the awkward questions raised by it (wind farms and more nuclear waste in your backyard? Higher electricity and fuel bills?). These changes and challenges North and South are neatly summarised in the shifting US and Chinese positions. The financial crash is significant too: it has revived a sense that the state has both responsibility for and can have some power over the economy and it has breathed life into phrases like 'green new deal'. Hence these talks are going on in the context of a much more cautious and critical view of unfettered markets.

But with climate change going up the public agenda around the world government ministers are now working in the full glare of media attention. The media want conflict, event and personality, and in looking for these they can distort the (dull but important) work of international policy development. Bluntly, the talks are about who cuts emissions by how much and when. Every move has consequences and it’s no longer enough to talk glibly about 'low hanging fruit' of easy emissions cuts. To meet climate change with the kind of energy and imagination that will be required will need us to rethink and rewire almost every aspect of contemporary life. The 24/7 short attention span world of the media may not allow much political space for this.

Nevertheless we are helped by the fact that plenty of new people have joined the climate change story since the talks that produced the Kyoto Protocol in the 1990s. Lord Stern is one of them. This respected economist was commissioned by Gordon Brown and Tony Blair to lay out the options for a mainstream western government. Stern found that early action to cut emissions and avoid warming ends up much cheaper than delaying action and paying big bills later to cope with the effects of climate change. And cutting emissions later is also tougher.

So the arguments have been piling up in favour of a robust deal this year. But we shouldn't raise expectations too high: as one wise head noted how people always overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in a decade. Also, focusing on the international politics can distract us from the fact that there are many other creative and determined responses to environmental change in play. On that note, my next post will be about a new Open University project - Creative Climate - that will work to capture the human story of environmental change from 2010 to 2020. We’ll be hoping that plenty of people in the OU community – students, associates, staff – will contribute to that work. More on that soon.

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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environmentalists clustered earlier this year to say 'regretfully I’ve changed my mind – climate change is so big it justifies turning to nuclear power’

There was a minor media flurry when two or three prominent UK environmentalists clustered earlier this year to say 'regretfully I’ve changed my mind – climate change is so big it justifies turning to nuclear power’.

Having been asked several times in the last fortnight what I reckon to this argument I’ve decided to pull my thoughts together into one place. Here are the arguments put by the nuclear public relations folks, with my own response to them:

• New Jobs! It’ll be French and German companies and technicians that are most likely to benefit from UK growth in nuclear generation, and we'll be paying top whack as there'll be an acute skills shortage if the industry grows as fast as it hopes. And these are very expensive jobs to ‘create’ in the sense that other kinds of energy related investment generate many more.

• Too Cheap to Meter! (and this time we mean it!) This bold promise was never delivered in the 20th century – on the contrary – nuclear always needed government cash. But everyone anticipates that energy and climate crunches together will see the cost of carbon-based fuels rise and hence the competitiveness of nuclear and renewables increase. Although it’s likely that we'd still need to see central government reaching into its pocket to cover decommissioning/waste issues nuclear is going to become much more competitive. But, it still requires really immense initial capital investment and long time scales.

OK so it may be a French company that’s asking to build them, but it is hardly an investment risk. They’ll only put up the money if prices are guaranteed and waste costs covered by future UK taxpayers. Eggs in several baskets!

Nuclear power plant, Biblis Germany.
[Image by Bigod, some rights reserved]

 The nuclear PR folks are politely pro renewable energy. They suggest it’s good to spread our energy investments. The difficulty with this is that in periods where central government and private investment is under pressure there are opportunity costs carried by any choice. It is simply politically naive to suggest that major commitments to N power will not result in reduced investments in energy efficiency programmes or renewables. Renewables can't do it all & carbon capture and storage are untried and costly! Probably the best card in the N hand. But it assumes that we have to match or grow current levels of energy demand and do nothing to reduce it.

Almost all of developed world society processes and products are 'energy blind'. They developed in an era of very low cost energy and are hugely wasteful. Why not spend the 15 years and many billions we might invest in a decent sized N programme in really aggressive demand-management and clean green re-design of much that we do. Unlike an investment in N power many of these measures would carry plenty of other environmental and social benefits: the collateral benefits of N investment are largely confined to those getting jobs and research funding.

The PR insists that nuclear power's waste issues were always exaggerated and the greens' criticisms were emotional not rational. Whatever the truth of the matter, the industry must be the last people on the planet that think that human systems are infallible.

radwaste is a classic case study of how we pursue short term interests and discount future generations

Having said that the new systems produce less waste and there are much more convincing ways of dealing with particularly the low level stuff. And we already have a big pile of it in the UK anyway. But I think radwaste is a classic case study of how we pursue short term interests and discount future generations - the formal economic process of calculating discount rates generally considers that the best gift you can offer to future generations is a wealthy present. Hence economic and policy analysis has favoured N power in the present and not considered costs to the future of these technologies (including opportunity costs mentioned above).

So in summary – yes we need to invest in effective waste management to deal with the pile we’ve got but let’s not compound the problem further. There's a climate monster behind the door! This is the argument that whatever the downsides we must at all costs avoid a climate tipping point.

The UEA's Professor Tim Lenton says be careful with painting a picture of a threat of one great tipping point - it will propel us towards over hasty techno fixes that may generate new problems, and is in any case a bit of a distraction in terms of how to represent climate change. He makes this point in relation to geo-engineering but the same goes for N. He's lead author on nuanced paper on 'Tipping Elements'.

Well, the industry is set to expand but this raises the geopolitics/terrorism question. I don't think this is the best moment to pick to promote an industry that requires high levels of centralised control and regulation, high levels of security and a great deal of care around the tracking of fuel, waste and protection of plant. It intensifies the heat in already fraught political contexts. How will we decide on who has the tech, on what 'safe' and 'civilian' amounts to and what the wider consequences of sustaining big postgraduate N professions across the world?

Politicians have to agree to drive energy demand down dramatically

I'd agree with anyone that this much endangered low hanging fruit won't deliver the kinds of emissions cuts that might mitigate the threat of dangerous climate change. Politicians have to agree to drive energy demand down dramatically. Politically impossible to make our housing stock decent, our towns and cities pleasant and healthy, and our experience of travel more rewarding? For this and a host of other reasons we need to redefine quality of life.

To say to other nations that 'we can have nuclear power but you aren't mature enough' is not going to help gather an international community to address global challenges.

The sibling issue is that the west chasing after nuclear again makes it appear that this is the 'developed' choice. That's despite the Finns working on a new plant whose installation will overshoot by several years and lots of cash and has Finnish contractors and government and the French and German builders bickering over whose fault it is.

In short: there are fast, cheap ways of cutting energy consumption in the near term that we've still not done and those will deliver emissions cuts years before the nuclear engineers reach for the 'on' button.

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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Flowers blossoming in December.
[image by Metrix X, some rights reserved]

This is just the latest in a long line of ‘last chance’ international shindigs that date back to the first UN conference on the environment in Stockholm in 1972. There are signs of heavy political weather ahead. Despite his best efforts Obama is finding it tough turning the political and public mood on the topic, and Indian and Chinese negotiators aren’t going to make it easy to bind the big emitters of the developing world into mitigation (mainly carbon reduction) commitments.

I hope for dramatic and far-reaching agreement, but to be honest I don’t expect it. For that reason I feel it is a political and communications mistake to load too much emphasis on one meeting, or indeed on the idea of there being one international political solution. This is not the same as saying that individual or community responses are the way to go instead. The town of Modbury’s banning of plastic bags is inspirational, and the world’s first ‘carbon free’ village pub ditto, but in the face of the immense task of transforming the global political economy of energy a lot of small actions add up to… a lot of small actions.

Analysing what might be the most effective policies, and assessing what political work needs to be done to implement them is one of the most interesting areas to be working in as environmental social scientist.

I’ve always assumed that my own longstanding enthusiasm for a global carbon tax in place of the complex mechanisms associated with the Kyoto process must be naïve and wrongheaded. I tell myself that there must be really good reasons why so much political capital has been invested in such an unwieldy and complex set of policies when a really straightforward idea lies easily to hand. But in the last six months I’ve heard several people who are in a good position to know shrug their shoulders and acknowledge that a global carbon tax is the only really intuitive and fair way forward.

It would send the simplest and clearest message (£££) to the point where pollution happens. Those extra costs would be passed on to other businesses, government and consumers informing their decisions much more effectively than all of the climate communications efforts of the world put together. Efficiency investments would be rewarded with lower costs, and profligacy punished. The funds raised could be spent in three ways: to reduce other taxes (making this politically attractive amongst the world’s middle classes), to invest in green technologies (boosting the economy) and to pay for the costs of climate change adaptation (mostly to be felt in the developing world in the medium term).

Yes we should all ask our politicians to push things as far and as fast as is possible at Copenhagen, but if the talks fall flat lets be ready to have bold thoughts about other approaches to cutting the risks of dangerous climate change.

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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Despite the compelling story of a pilot safely landing on the Hudson river this week the far bigger air travel story in my view is the UK Government’s decision to give the go-ahead to the building of a 3^rd Heathrow runway. But this is a story of more than domestic significance. A comment from the Chinese news agency Xinhua reads like an answer to an exam essay question on tensions between economic and environmental interests:

Despite claims by governments that the environment remains top of their agenda, they have often had to make a sacrifice as the economy becomes a greater priority. This is reflected by the recent decision by the British government, which gave the go-ahead to the controversial expansion of Heathrow airport in London, one of the busiest air hubs in the world. It seems that in the face of the recession, even a strong advocate of low-carbon growth must downplay their green ethics to make way for the economic development of the country.

Dongying Wang, Xinhua, 17 January 2009

Benny Peiser subbed this down for his perky and provocative ‘climate contrarian’ newsletter: ‘China Smiles As Britain’s Climate Policy Goes Up In Smoke’. Not for the first time with his missives I wouldn’t have put it quite like that myself, but it’s certainly true that this decision is a pretty tidy summary of how little the key players in the UK Government have absorbed about the meaning of the term ‘sustainability’. The Labour governments’ noisy claims to international leadership on climate change since 1997 look tawdry nowadays – and in a critical year for climate politics with the Kyoto follow up being negotiated in advance of it coming into force in 2012.

Heathrow airport.
[image by Amin Tabrizi, some rights reserved]

The decision not to manage demand (down) but rather to pursue the ‘sixties road building dictum of ‘predict and provide’ leaves little room for optimism about the goal of making big cuts in CO2 emissions in the UK. Air travel is still a relatively small proportion of CO2 emissions, but it is one of the fastest growing, and once people settle into consumption patterns based around cheap air travel these habits can be hard to break.

The defence that Minister Geoff Hoon offered up in the face of film star stunts targeted against the decision was playground stuff. He noted that they’re among the most enthusiastic users of the Heathrow-Los Angeles route. Emma Thompson may brush off the barb but I’m afraid it strikes its target with me. My Delhi air tickets will take me on a British Council sponsored tour of talks and films about media and environmental change, and yes, regular readers will know that last year I flew to Greenland with a Cape Farewell expedition.

I’ve come to my own deal with the devil about my decision to burn a good dose of jet fuel in relation to my work on communications and environmental change. But that doesn’t stop me feeling very sheepish indeed about these trips. But I come back to the fact that all the individualised worrying in the world isn’t going to help to make the price of air travel reflect its full environmental cost. Neither is it going to deliver big efficiency gains in the air fleet: these essential and urgent leadership tasks belong not to famous actors and unknown academics, but to politicians.

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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KT Tunstall and Emily Venables follow our route south on a map.
[image by Nathan Gallagher © copyright Nathan Gallagher]

A couple of my posts have referred to people’s anxieties about the Baffin-Boot-sized carbon footprint that coming on this trip entails. Sin and redemption are so woven into western culture that we shouldn’t be surprised that we frame these questions about individual responsibility in terms of sin and the pursuit of redemption. A few years ago Patriarch Bartholemew (leader of the orthodox church) announced that environmental harm was a sin (the Pope followed suit soon after). Of course they have a natural advantage over science and policy people when it comes to finding a language that seems to have the right kind of scale: they’ve been phrasemaking on the big questions for centuries.

But we might yet work towards a secular language, a set of references, that help us make sense of the moment we’re in. This expedition is an experiment, a model society, a mad throw together of very different personalities and talents. And we’ve been busy, creative and above all happy.

This afternoon a session on positivity in response to climate change. Marcus Brigstocke ran the session and asked me to talk about the book I edited with Andrew Simms from new economics foundation: Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth. My vanity satisfied by finding that the essays have made a big impact on his work and he’s been pushing it on friends.

I’m hoping that some of the people here on the boat will contribute to another product of the Interdependence Day project - the Encyclopedia of Interdependence that I’ll be working on over the next couple of years with my wife Renata Tyszczuk.

To sign off I’m going to borrow a quote from Ian McEwan’s brilliant essay written in the wake of an earlier Cape Farewell voyage A Boot Room in The Frozen North.The piece plays off the gradual collapse of civilised behaviour in the wet, cold, cramped boot room of the ship. He concludes thus:

We must not be too hard on ourselves. If you were banished to another galaxy tomorrow, you would soon be fatally homesick for your brothers and sisters and all their flaws: somewhat co- operative, somewhat selfish, and very funny. But we will not rescue the earth from our own depredations until we understand ourselves a little more, even if we accept that we can never really change our natures. All boot rooms need good systems so that flawed creatures can use them well. Good science will serve us well, but only good rules will save the boot room. Leave nothing to idealism or outrage, or even good art. (We know in our hearts that the very best art is entirely and splendidly useless). On our last morning, when all the packing has been done and the last reluctant skidoo had been started up, and as the pure northern air is rent by the howls and stink of our machines, our tirelessly tolerant hosts (as forgiving as God has not yet learned to be ) come down the gang plank and set down on the ice a vast plastic sack with all the recovered gear found in every corner of the ship. A few of us gather around this treasure, and poke about in it, not ashamed or even faintly embarrassed, but innocently amazed. Here's our stuff! Where's it been hiding all this time? We barely know ourselves, and our collective nature is still a source of wonder - why else write fiction? We haven't stopped surprising ourselves yet, and the fate of all our boot rooms hangs in the balance.

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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Disko(very) Bob.
[image by Nathan Gallagher © copyright Nathan Gallagher]

Climate change is just one of the reasons why there is more oceanography and geology going on in the region. Sovereign states in the region are investing a good deal in trying to establish the best evidence to support resource claims. There has been a flurry of news stories over the last year or so about a scramble for Arctic resources by the countries of the region. The planting of a Russian flag by a mini-sub on the seabed at the North Pole was interpreted in reports around the world as a form of land grab.

In practical terms it was meaningless and there are due legal processes for working out sovereign rights over the seabed. The reporting was a little shrill (that was the point for Putin I guess, above all domestically). But there will be jockeying for position for the mineral resources that will become more easily accessible as higher temperatures melt the sea ice.

The Arctic offers a textbook example of how exploration, exploitation and sovereignty frequently lock together. Reading in advance of the trip, and for writing part of the Arctic materials for the new Open University environment course, delivered a few surprises.

The term British Empire was first coined in relation to a claim to the region drawn up by polymath John Dee for Elizabeth I in the sixteenth century. He rooted the claim in an argument that King Arthur had colonised the Arctic lands (he drew on references to an evidently less than authoritative monk – 11th C I recall).

The explorer (read pirate) Martin Frobisher made three voyages to Arctic Canada, and brought back huge quantities of what the alchemists had promised was gold ore. Despite the best efforts of the largest smelting plant in England it turned out to be no more interesting than heavy black rocks (basalt?). You can see them today – they were recycled into an Elizabethan manor house wall that still stands in Deptford.

Afternoon taken up with rehearsals for a whole group performance of Paradise Lost and a discussion on 'Creativity and Change'. In an hour we barely got going but did lay out some useful markers.

Stephen: in the context of the discussions about resources, climate change and the Arctic, people are asking what hope there is of Copenhagen 2009 UN FCCC meeting delivering a meaningful progress.

What's your reading? Will either US presidential candidate make enough of a difference to the process?

Now that we're at sea heading south we've all a little more time to ourselves and am missing home – and that's after a little more than a week. How did Nansen and friends cope for a year locked in the ice? How do the Polar scientists cope spending months in a hut in these very lonely places?

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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To be in the Arctic is inspiring but the responses and needs vary widely. Some want to engage in some slow careful thinking about new work (ceramics, opera, theatre, writing), others want to work out how they can do their environmental housekeeping and understand the issues well enough to help engage their huge audiences in the topic (musicians).

Today a high point among high points in terms of multi-sensory experience of the place. Went ashore to the foot of the glacier again but in a much smaller group. A dozen of us scattered across the beach and glacier pursuing individual projects and finding some space to ourselves. Aggressive wind – emptied the rucksack and wore every last shred. More layering than an onion.

Ryuichi Sakamoto recording sound near the mouth of a glacier
[image by Nathan Gallagher © copyright Nathan Gallagher]

Sublime went out of fashion as a word and notion a while back, but it's a good word to start with in making sense of the experience of travelling through a fjord – the only humans for many miles. Some great talkers were mute as we cruised through a Fjord. Correct me if I'm wrong Mark, but I understand that we passed Wegener's camp from which he set out on an expedition that gave birth to the theory of plate tectonics. The concept of a 'whole earth' came out of earth sciences and is one of the lines of descent that arrives at today's urgent and vital climate science.

About the author

Joe Smith is a lecturer in the environment at the Open University and chair of Interdependence Day. He has written books on climate change and sustainability, the media and global issues, and the green movement.

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Plenty of talk on responsibility and how (and whether) people manage to justify our own ‘climate tour’. I could do with some help from my colleague Stephen (that’s Stephen Peake: for the non OU readers – Stephen is a climate change policy specialist who used to work with the UN’s policy body the UN FCCC).

One of the blog posts has asked whether we feel powerless to affect the way the Arctic is changing. In short – is it too late to do anything about climate change? Is the arctic certain to melt? Is action futile? Stephen and I have talked these issues through hundreds of times over more than 16 years of friendship and collaboration. How to walk the line between hope and despair? [read Stephen's answer] My own response? No – there’s plenty that can be done, and optimism costs nothing. Pessimism however could be very expensive indeed.

1750 marked the birth of a new geological era – the Anthropocene. There’s no doubt that human activity since the industrial revolution is intervening in natural processes of change. It’s the first time a geological era has been associated with the impact of just one animal. This naming of a new stratigraphic layer isn’t just due to climate change: plastics and other new materials and impacts of agriculture and urbanisation also help to win humanity this dubious honour.

There’s plenty of loose and exaggerated language around climate change for sure, but it is not too grand to say that we’re at a hinge point  in history (both ‘big time’ and small: geological and human). The CO2 emissions already committed to the atmosphere promise climate change for a century and more into the future, and that will change the Arctic. Can we preserve what Inuit leader Sheila Watt-Cloutier calls their ‘right to be cold’? Yes there will be further impacts on this extraordinary place even if CO2 emissions nose-dived tomorrow.

Exploring the arctic at the current time forces you to think on potential loss. Whether by coming here (not all at once please) or (better) by engaging with the scientific or cultural responses that echo out from an expedition like Cape Farewell it is inevitable that people will be moved by the prospect of losing something unique and important. But being here has really lifted us all. Whether we work with climate change professionally or are coming to it with pretty fresh eyes there is a really positive energy on board that must be coming from the mad mix of people and from simply being this ‘last imaginary place’.

Joe Smith
[image by Nathan Gallagher © copyright Nathan Gallagher]