It’s the season for an overstretched seaside metaphor: with around three months to go I’m beginning to sense a gathering swell of interest in the Copenhagen climate talks later this year. We’ll all be hearing plenty more about ‘COP 15’ (the Fifteenth Conference of the Parties in the UN climate policy negotiations) in the weeks to come. Tempting to bring in plenty more storm (teacup?) surf (opportunity?) and shipping analogies but I’ll resist. Enough now just to note down a few thoughts about what I anticipate about the conference and its significance. I’ll be going as a member of an OU team that will be working to make sense of the event and to analyse and communicate day by day.

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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OK - I'm sorry - more of an essay than a blog post, but I’ve got to get all this off my chest in one go. In the 1980s across Europe you would see stickers with a sparky little cartoon atom character shouting ‘nuclear power - no thanks!'.

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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If I had a pound for every time an environmentalist set a near and scary deadline for serious action on climate change I would be able to retire to a Norwegian mountaintop survival pod and await the end of civilisation tomorrow. The next date in the diary is the UN climate policy meeting in Copenhagen in early December this year (‘UN FCCC COP 15’ to give its full snappy title). It is hoped an effective follow up to the Kyoto agreement will be mapped out.

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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