The Forbidden Political Dictionary Complete and Unapproved

Have you ever read The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce? When I was in my late teens I went through a stage where I was reading whatever I could get my hands on about witchcraft. Many girls go through this, probably because when you’re a teenager you feel like a witch—misunderstood, alienated, and persecuted. I added The Devil’s Dictionary to my small collection, bought only on the strength of the front cover which was red and featured tiny demons.

If you’ve read The Devil’s Dictionary you know that it is not a book about demonology or witchcraft. Instead, it’s a small dictionary that offers perverse, ironic definitions of a selection of terms. It translates what people say into what they mean. For example, Bierce defined “lawyer” as “one skilled in the circumvention of the law.” I was not disappointed in this little volume; I found it amusing and accurate. Even as an adolescent, I was cynical (as defined by Bierce, a cynic is “a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.”)

Many years have passed, and another slim volume with a red cover has been published, The Forbidden Political Dictionary - Complete and Unapproved. Again, it is a dictionary of terms, many of which did not exist when Ambrose Bierce wrote, with their true meanings. Written by John Clifton, The Forbidden Political Dictionary defines “lawyer” as “One versed in litigation and skilled in prevarication who represents clients and misrepresents facts in order to beat the law.” Like me, John Clifton is an admirer of Ambrose Bierce. I know this because I read the forward to his book, something he thinks no one will do.

Clifton is also a cynic, which he defines as “Perceptive person who sees falsity where others see truth and truth where others see falsity. Cynics are often deemed perverse, nasty souls, but are actually honest, nasty souls.” His definitions will strike a chord of familiarity (“interim appointment, n. Sale of a vacated office”) in those who are exposed to politics, even by accident.

Allowable Political Activities of Non-Profits

In the last few months there has been a lot of news coverage about IRS investigations into churches and charities regarding their political activities. One local church, Pasadena's All Saints Episcopal Church, is actively resisting IRS subpoenas regarding an anti-war/anti-Bush sermon given just a few days before the 2004 Presidential election. These recent occurrences demonstrate just how important it is for churches, charities and other non-profits to ensure that their political activities are within the limits of U.S. Tax Law, an issue this article addresses.

The most common form of organization for churches, charities and other non-profits is called a 501(c)(3), after the section of the tax law that grants their tax exempt status. Donations made to these groups, unlike those made to politicians or political groups, are deductible by the donor. Because donors to 501(c)(3)s are able to deduct their contribution, the organization is forbidden from "substantially" engaging in lobbying and absolutely prohibited from participating in any political campaign.

The difference between lobbying and a political campaign is that lobbying is an attempt to influence legislation and a political campaign elects a specific person to a governmental position. Here in California we have referendums or propositions, which are laws voted on by the public. These are considered legislation by the IRS and a 501(c)(3) can attempt to influence the outcome, as long as their efforts are not "substantial."

Unfortunately, the definition of "substantial" can be unclear. The IRS will examine the time devoted by staff & volunteers and the expenditures made in support of legislation. It is within the discretion of the IRS, however, to determine whether the contributions and efforts of the group were substantial.

Charities, other than religious institutions, can elect to use the expenditure test under IRC 501(h). This allows them to avoid the subjective IRS test and instead rely on their actual expenditures. The organization would then be allowed to expend up to 20% of the first $500,000 spent in a given year, with the allowable percentage decreasing up to a total of $1,000,000 spent on legislative campaigns. Though this does create some additional paperwork for the charities, because it lets charities know exactly how much they can spend, it might be wise for non-profits with substantial legislative activities to consider.

The prohibition against non-profit involvement in political campaigns, those in which a person is elected, is much stricter. Non-profits are completely prohibited from participating in these campaigns. Of course churches and charities can participate in election activities, such as voter registration drives or candidate forums, but they are absolutely prohibited from supporting any candidate.

If a non-profit does wish to hold a candidate forum, they need to ensure that all candidates are the opportunity to speak at the same or similar events, that no one from the organization expresses direct support of any candidate, and that no fundraising occurs. Alternately, candidates can speak at non-profits as non-candidates, i.e. because of their position in the community, current elected office, or other reason. In these situations, however, both the candidate and representatives of the non-profit are forbidden from mentioning the election and that the speaker is running for office.

Obviously, the regulation of non-profits can be complex. Hopefully this article has helped some community leaders understand exactly what churches and charities can and cannot do in connection with politics. If any detailed questions arise, the IRS website has good resources, or you can consult with a qualified attorney.

Creative destruction – the missing link between inequality and climate policy

We were recently challenged on the question of how inequality can be reduced at the same time as the transition to a low carbon economy can be managed. We agree that both need to be addressed at simultaneously, since sharp inequality makes the politics of climate policy much more difficult.

My starting point is to argue that we first need to understand what is driving inequality. At the top end, it is clearly about the rise of finance, but in a recent pamphlet co-authoured with Adam Lent, I lay out the case that in much of the economy it is innovation that is the main mechanism.

Innovation does drive growth – there is now compelling evidence that what drives increased productivity and growth in living standards is not investment per se, or the development of this or that particular sector, but the process of innovation – not only technological but also managerial and institutional.

Indeed the enormous creative dynamism of capitalist market economies, and the huge growth that innovation has unleashed in the last 300 years, is the single most striking thing about capitalism. By contrast, much recent debate - both about the causes of the crisis and the right response to it - is still framed by the long 20th century struggle between market fundamentalism and those, including Keynesians, who reject the idea that markets are fundamentally stable and self-correcting if left to themselves and argue for a crucial role for the state to intervene to put that failure right.

This debate is important, espeically in the conetx of recovery from crisi or recession. But the reality is that neither free markets nor Keynesian demand management are in themselves guarantors of long term growth, As the growing sub-discipline of evolutionary economics emphasises, what is important about real economies is not their static allocative efficiency, but their dynamic potential.

But there is also a dark side to innovation. Schumpeter characterised it as “creative destruction”, and there are always winners and losers in the process. One effect is literally the destruction of jobs and obsolescence of investment as a result of technological change, most obviously in the period of deindustrialisation which followed the election of Thatcher at the end of the 1970s, but which has continued since. In 1978, a quarter of the workforce was employed in manufacturing, which is down to 8% since, despite the fact that the value of production has doubled. These changes are largely due to technical change.

The losers are not only factory workers, but all workers whose work is routine, and including clerical workers, and now, for example, supermarket checkout staff. The hollowing out of employment and stagnation of wages in medium skilled but routine work has resulted in the “squeezed middle” phenomenon which so many politicians have picked up on. By contrast, skilled workers whose productivity is boosted by IT (including in finance) have seen their relative wages soar since the 1970s.

The old left response to these forces was to resist them, but this approach was first broken by Thatcher and then abandoned by New Labour, which sought instead to compensate losers through redistribution from tax. Resisting innovation does not make sense, for it will suppress growth and the benefits of higher productivity. But the strategy of redistribution also comes up against limits, both political and economic.

We argue that instead we should be seeking to radically expand participation in innovation, to spread the gains as widely as possible, and put much more serious effort into helping people move from old to new jobs throughout their lives. This is about rethinking not just skills and training but also the purpose of social security. Taking innovation seriously also means seeing how disruptive it can be to society, and ensuring that, while technologies may become obsolete and companies may fail, the same is not true of people.

Finally, we also need to start to shape innovation more actively. Evolutionary economists argue that innovation in an economy is just like the evolutionary process in the natural world, where success is defined by how well species fit in to the environment.

In the economic world, that environment is crucially shaped by policy. For example, up until recently, there has been no incentive to direct innovation to low carbon technologies, and as a result we live in a world where dirty energy and transport is very cheap. But we can and must radically change the policy environment for innovation, redirecting creativity and entrepreneurship towards making clean energy cheap.

The Politics of Climate Change

A primer for the last in ippr’s A Climate of Politics events series (9.00am, ippr, Tuesday 29 June 2010)

In partnership with Christian Aid and WWF-UK and with technical assistance from Cisco Systems, ippr - Political Climate’s parent organisation – has been grappling with the politics of climate change (rather than climate change policy). The final event in a series of five focuses on creating political space for more ambitious action on climate change. We hope this post – which is our interpretation of what we’ve heard so far – is interesting in its own right, but we also hope it will help get the debate going for those attending.

What have we learnt from the series, which has looked so far at the UNFCCC process and the politics in China, the US and the EU? There are perhaps four important lessons…

Lesson One: The UN negotiations cannot be the only game in town.

The process of treaty negotiation is still seemingly in the grip of post-Copenhagen paralysis. But there is much talk of how global climate strategy has to be built from the bottom up. In our first debate, Professor Steve Rayner of Oxford University’s Institute for Science, Innovation and Society argued elloquently that without robust national action focussed on investment in technology, it would be impossible to move forward internationally.

The bottom-up approach need not be pursued to the exclusion of the UNFCCC process. But it would seem that pressing for an international agreement before the political conditions in key countries have improved is no more likely to be successful now than it was at Copenhagen.

Lesson Two: China’s leadership is reliant on high economic growth rates.

Decision making in China is a lengthy process and so conventional summit diplomacy, in which leader peer pressure is presumed to raise the stakes, does not work. Also – unsurprisingly – growth and not environmental protection is the number one priority and so China is only likely to consider the latter where it either impedes or assists the former. So more ambitious action on climate change is likely to come from attempts to deal with other forms of more visceral environmental pollution or because climate-friendly technologies spur growth.

Lesson Three: The US needs a ‘plan b’ in case the Senate bill fails.

While it’s too early to give up on a Senate bill on energy (with perhaps some climate elements), the chances of failure are still high. Michael Schellenberger of The Breakthrough Institute argued that in order to stave off competition from China, the US needs to invest in technological innovation and that an investment-led approach funded using a modest carbon tax would be a good ‘plan b’.

Lesson Four: The EU needs to get its act together.

Economic crisis in Europe and its perceived loss of leadership during the Copenhagen meeting has forced the EU onto the back foot on climate change. But even prior to Copenhagen, the issue was not resolved inside Europe. We heard from Kzrysztof Bobinski how Poland’s leaders are largely uninterested in climate change as an issue in itself and how climate may only resonate in Warsaw if it becomes synonymous with energy independence from Russia. An EU-wide political strategy on climate change to galvanise the union into more effective leadership needs to have such thinking at its heart.

The Way Forward

Those of us who work on climate change have been guilty of focussing too much on inter-governmental politics rather than understanding the politics of climate change at the national level. While most people in most countries are far from being deniers, they are equally unready to suffer (any more) economic pain for the climate’s sake. And so governments in key countries lack a mandate for the kinds of swingeing policies necessary.

How can that be changed?

Keep calm and carry on: Alex Evans argued in our US debate that the impacts of climate change would ultimately be the driver of more ambitious action and that, like Churchill in the wilderness, we should ensure we’re politically prepared and in the meantime resist appeasement in the form of political realists.

Don’t mention the climate: Research conducted last year by ippr points to a reframing of the climate issue. The evidence from this and other polls suggests that people are strongly in favour of renewable energy, but less willing to bear the costs of a shift in energy technology, especially if the reason for doing so is to stop climate change.

Fight a different set of battles: Steve Rayner and Michael Schellenberger are both authors of the Hartwell Paper and both support the prioritisation of a different set of policies in order to address the politics. For instance, they argue that a focus on investment in clean technology rather than on taxing emissions will stimulate more support for policy.

Swords into shares of the atmosphere: Rather than reframing the debate or changing the focus of climate policy to fit where people are now, some, such as Tom Crompton, argue that we need to engage with people’s (consumerist) values and shape them for better environmental and social outcomes.

We mention these approaches not because they are an exhaustive list but because they epitomise where the debate on climate politics currently rests. They are clearly not mutually exclusive; in an ideal world we would pursue all of the above and more concurrently. But with limited time and resources, what should be our focus? Let the discussion commence!

Stoking the Eskom Debate

Before we start, it’s important to make two things very clear. First, Political Climate thinks that building new coal-fired power stations without emissions abatement is unwise on climate grounds. Second, we think subsidies for the capital costs of new electricity generation should now be focussed on renewables. But, as the unfolding debate concerning the building by Eskom of a massive coal power plant at Lephalale in South Africa’s Limpopo Province illustrates, simply holding such views is not enough.

The plant (the above picture is its construction site) has been named ‘Medupi’ by state-owned Eskom. This apparently means ‘rain that soaks parched lands’ – perhaps unfortunate given the climate impacts of coal. At 4,788 MW of installed generating capacity, Medupi will be an absolute monster; reportedly the fourth largest coal plant in the world.

Medupi is especially controversial, though, because it has been awarded concessional finance – a loan of $3.75 billion from the World Bank. Thus northern taxpayers are subsidising the construction of a large point source of carbon emissions (although part of this loan is said by the Bank to be for renewables).

To add insult to the injurious feelings of those who campaigned hard against the World Bank loan, it seems Eskom may be able to claim Clean Development Mechanism carbon credits for the plant. Medupi will use supercritical technology and the CDM board has approved a methodology for higher efficiency fossil fuel plants (i.e. for claiming credits against a baseline of less efficient technology – in this case subcritical coal). Campaigners are understandably outraged.

The World Bank’s defence of its loan, which presumably enables the project to proceed, or at least to do so at lower cost to the South African taxpayer, is less than 100 per cent convincing and throws up few surprises. South Africa, the Bank argues, has increased grid coverage massively in recent years but without increasing baseload. Medupi will help stabilise supply and meet demand and therefore it will benefit poor households. Notwithstanding the concerns in some quarters, about the structure of tariffs in South Africa, these are the same arguments the Bank has used for decades to justify involvement in large scale power plants and, carbon emissions aside, the opposition sounds similar too.

When the loan was voted on by the World Bank’s board, the US, the UK, the Netherlands, Italy and Norway all apparently abstained, registering disapproval while not preventing approval. The US government spoke out against the Bank’s involvement, but political rhetoric was not in the end backed up by actions.

The tale of Eskom’s mighty new coal plant, it’s subsidised loans and putative carbon credits merely illustrates how very far away our collective actions are from our rhetoric on climate change. Eskom could invest differently, but it is not in its commercial interests to do so; the World Bank’s main investors could more robustly re-purpose its energy finance but as yet they have not; the CDM board could have refused to approve a fossil fuel efficiency methodology (and have saved itself from ridicule), but it didn’t. At each step there is political as well as policy failure.

Underscoring the whole debate is the inexorable quest for development. There may be very good micro arguments as to why Medupi is not a pro-poor power plant, but it is hard to argue against the logic at the national energy strategy level in countries such as South Africa that demands cheap, coal-fired power.

Medupi is certain to be opposed every step of the way by campaigners – and not just those with climate change in mind. But if we are to avoid future Medupi’s, three things have to change.

Development Bank-style lending needs to be focussed on helping to bring down the cost of capital for and injecting confidence into renewables sectors. The argument at the World Bank needs to be won so that the subsidy is switched to low carbon energy technologies. But debates over the Bank’s financing of energy projects are currently too polluted by calls for the institution to play no part at all in climate-related investments. A cleaned up Bank with its fingers in the climate pie would surely be better than a dirty Bank without. The next step on this is a smart political strategy to influence the Bank as it reinvents its approach to energy financing.

Second, campaigners must wholly embrace the low-carbon innovation challenge. As we have argued in previous posts, hard-headed economic decisions will favour conventional technologies until innovation brings down the cost of new technology. So it really isn’t just a straightforward battle on the rain soaked parched lands of the Limpopo valley between clean and dirty technology as under the current rules of engagement, low carbon is likely to lose.

Thus, in the context of coal, pushing hard for early demonstration of CCS at the kind of scale demanded by Medupi is the logical step beyond simply saying no to unabated coal. More broadly we need to develop and advocate for national and international (regional or bilateral rather than global) innovation policies that widen rather than narrow our technological choices in the future.

Third, there needs to be a clear story to explain and guide policymaking. Arguing against projects like Medupi on climate grounds alone is demonstrably not enough. We need to construct a narrative that is closer to people’s immediate wellbeing to explain why low-carbon technology is necessary, especially for poor people in countries such as South Africa.

Copenhagen’s Carcass

Six months on and commentators continue to pick the last morsels of analysis off the carcass of the 15th Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen. The UK’s Guardian, for instance, has had a couple of goes at this piece, which pins the blame on the Danes and their cursed text.

Per Meilstrup, a Danish journalist, has written a whole book on COP 15 – largely the source of the Guardian piece – and reveals the ‘real’ Danish text on his blog.

Mistakes were clearly made – by the Danes and the UNFCCC’s secretariat – but the key question that the climate coroners need to ask is arguably this one: Had Lars Lokke Rasmussen not botched the high-level diplomacy, would Copenhagen have concluded with a more substantive outcome? The answer is almost certainly still no.

Why? The reasons are fundamentally to do with politics at the national level, which is where the politics mostly are. China and the US had already made announcements before Copenhagen and because of their respective domestic decision making processes, neither were in a position to increase their offers. So the conventional logic of diplomacy – that governments always arrive at summits with something extra tucked in their back pockets – did not hold.

Had events played out differently, the EU might have enjoyed its 30 per cent moment, but as the recent London Times debacle has illustrated, the debate among member states is by no means settled. While waiting in one of Copenhagen’s many queues, I chatted to an adviser to one European government’s finance minister who told me the Poles had only consented to 30 per cent in principle and on the understanding that Poland incurred no additional cost. How would that work?

It’s a real shame de Boer’s legacy is Copenhagen. Few people can have worked harder for a climate treaty. But the Danish lesson is not so much one of diplomatic failure. The leaders that matter have no mandate to agree a new climate treaty.

Realism, readiness and rhetoric

What’s the right response to the politics of climate change – realism about the current impasse or holding out for the change that must surely come? A couple of weeks ago foreign policy expert Alex Evans posted a long piece on the Global Dashboard website, partly in response to an argument he was having with Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute at a recent ippr event. Here’s our perspective.

Alex starts by bemoaning the fact that an increasingly widespread response to the failure at Copenhagen is to argue that legally-binding international agreement with environmentally effective targets, along with global carbon markets, is currently impossible, and instead we should be trying to support national policies, like expanding renewable energy and driving through energy efficiency measures.

He then lays into Shellenberger for proposing an aspirational framing of climate policy in place of the more traditional environmentalist frame of limits. Alex has no time for this kind of talk:

“So enough with all the doom and gloom. Focus on the possibilities! The new jobs! The gadgets! Green new deal! All must win prizes! Well, I hate to be the party pooper, but – seriously? Are we all really drinking this Kool-aid?”

His dismissal of the so-called “bottom up” approach to policy, and a framing that appeals to the positive side of human nature, is based on two main points.

First, bottom up, voluntary actions won’t get us to where we need to be. No government in the OECD can afford to subsidise new low carbon technologies. In the end, decarbonisation costs money, and we can’t do it without carbon pricing.

Second, the Green New Deal story is unconvincing, and those who lose their jobs in the high carbon economy will mobilise more effectively to block change than those who might get new jobs in clean energy.

His alternative proposal is an international agreement for “equal per capita shares to the atmosphere” based on climate science – i.e. Contraction and Convergence. The idealistic nature of this position is for Alex its strength, because he is playing the long game. As he puts it: “rather than realistic…I think the key thing at this stage is to be ready.”

What he thinks we need to be ready for turns out to be climate impacts, which have the Cinderella quality that they are “tough enough to frighten people badly, but not so bad as to overshoot irreversible tipping points”. A kind of Lehmann Brothers moment, or rather, a Poland moment, since Alex goes on make much of the contrast between Neville Chamberlain’s realism in the face of Hitler and Churchill’s years in the wilderness, preparing for a war that only he knew was inevitable, and the sacrifices that would be needed to fight that war: “What Churchill understood, one suspects, it seems to be in the nature of our species that we don’t get to ‘broad sunlit uplands’ without first going through a battle.”

At the end, Alex spells out the bottom line: “I think we’re kidding ourselves if we think that we can get through this without facing up to the need for principles on how we share out access to a world of finite resources, or the fact that this will involve sacrifice from those of us in the rich world.”

This is powerful, if morally loaded rhetoric, portraying Evans as the hero and Michael Shellenberger as an appeaser. But I am not convinced, for reasons arising from the fact that both the future – whether political or climate – is fundamentally unknowable.

Shellenberger says that a narrative based on limits and sacrifice will never work politically, and that we should invest heavily in technology because it may provide a solution that will be environmentally effective in the end. It has to be said that the evidence is with him on the first point, so far.

Alex says that there is no guarantee that the technology will work without targets and carbon pricing, and that we should prepare for the inevitable climate shock by investing in a politics of limits and sacrifice and a plan to go with it. I have some quibbles with Alex on the affordability of low carbon technology (it’s actually happening through higher energy bills, not higher public spending) and the distinction between carbon pricing and technology policy (read Chapter 16 of the Stern Review), but the main weakness of his argument lies in the second part.

There is simply no reason to believe that a climate shock big enough to bring about major changes in thinking will come along before we reach a tipping point (how would we know?). Climate change is by its nature long-term and insidious, more like a frog in a warming pot than a sudden Anschluss. And we have already had Hurricane Katrina, which demonstrated two things: first, that it is difficult, if not impossible, to authoritatively attribute single weather events to climate change, and second, that in such events, attention is immediately focused on what they show about the societies in which they happen.

In the case of Katrina, the story was not about what terrible things would happen with a changing climate, but about how the deep racial and class divisions in American society were laid bare, and the hopelessly inadequate response by the Bush regime. This indeed is the problem – most people are more interested in other people than they are in nature.

We have already had a generation of climate impacts. They will certainly get worse, and of course eventually they will impinge on the public mind that they do become a clear and present danger. But there is absolutely no reason to think that this will happen in the time frame that some action is needed. Bottom-up action may not get us there – that’s a real risk. But waiting for the flood is an even bigger one.

Why Is A US Climate Bill So Elusive?

According to at least one US commentator, Senate climate and energy legislation is now as dead as the parrot in Monty Python’s famous sketch. Without rehearsing the possible scenarios for introducing the bill at a later stage or the ins-and-outs of ‘lame duck sessions‘ and their possible voting scenarios, why is even such an apparently lame climate change bill so difficult to pass in the US?

Some of course blame it’s very lameness and the Democrat leadership’s unwillingness to push hard on the issue of climate itself. Others are dancing on the bill’s grave, arguing that putting cap and trade at its heart was a fatal flaw. And a further phalanx of pro-climate action views direct their anger at the ‘moral cowards‘ defending ‘narrow electoral interests’ in the Senate.The cap element of the bill died long ago. Cautious Senators with pressing electoral interests – such as not being seen to vote for increasing energy costs ahead of November elections – and no doubt significant palm-greasing by corporate interest groups made economy- or even energy utility-wide measures almost impossible. Sadly, cap and trade has taken a renewable energy standard down with it.

The key problem with cap and trade is not policy design but politics. The EU ETS is working well as a carbon market, but because all of its flaws require some tough politicking to correct, it is not as yet significantly serving its primary policy goal of reducing emissions. The more it does serve these interests, the less popular it will be. How much additional cost consumers will shoulder before it is too much is a question as yet without an answer. But putting costs to the fore and deferring benefits is unlikely to prove popular and doing so for climate reasons is, as we’ve argued here before, likely to prove unpopular.

There may well now be a serious rift opening up in the hitherto mostly united climate change movement. With a US bill still elusive and after the underwhelming outcome of the Copenhagen climate summit, many want a back to basics debate focussed on the science, the severity of impacts and urgency. Tom Freidman in the New York Times typifies this approach with a quasi-religious pitch that suggests we will all face a climate judgement day. Alex Evans in a recent ippr debate pursues a similar line of argument, urging Noah-like preparedness.

To broaden and deepen the appeal of policy that’s designed to have climate benefits, there is in our view a need to change the messenger and the message. The environmental movement that brought us Copenhagen and the US Senate bill has a very significant green wedge of support and has demonstrably influenced many leaders. But beyond the offices of the campaign groups and the corridors of power, green lifestyles are not vote-winners and doom-laden climate message is quickly lost in the miasma of ordinary people’s lives.

The ‘cowardly’ Senators who failed to indicate support for the US bill are probably acutely aware of this conundrum. It’s time for the rest of us to wake up to it.

Do equality and security help the politics of climate?

Would more security and more equality help improve climate politics? One recent analysis that has attracted a lot of attention – The Spirit Level by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett - argues that more inequality leads to greater consumerism and individualism, which in turn is a block on co-operation to tackle climate change. Meanwhile, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger argued in their book Break Through that a precondition for a concern with environmental sustainability is genuine economic security.

Is there evidence to support these ideas? As a first cut, we looked at Eurobarometer and Eurostat data on the EU 27 countries about attitudes to climate change (% saying it is a very serious issue), willingness to pay more for alternative energy, a measure of inequality (ratio of income in top two deciles to income in bottom two deciles) and a measure of economic security (spend per head on social protection).

It turns out that the relationship between inequality and security on the one hand and attitudes to climate change on the other are not strong. As the first two following figures show, there appears to be no relationship between the percentage saying climate is a very serious issue and the inequality measure, and only a loose one with the security indicator.

However, the picture with the percentage willing to pay more for alternative energy is very different. This measure is quite strongly related to inequality – the more unequal the income distribution, the smaller the proportion willing to pay more.

Similarly, the greater the spend on social protection, the higher the willingness to pay more for alternative energy.

One thing these data suggest are that the usual opinion polls asking people how they feel about climate change are not a good test of how they feel about real policies.

Of course, correlation and causation are not the same thing, and one can easily tell a story here about underlying sets of values that determine both variables (which in a way, is the point). Nevertheless, interesting and suggestive stuff…

Cutting innovation, not emissions?

In the UK the new coalition Government is beginning to swing the spending axe, and despite that fact that this will apparently be the “greenest government ever”, low carbon innovation is not spared. A number of technology support programmes have been axed, including £12.6 million from the Carbon Trust and £2.9 million from the Low Carbon Technology Programme. This comes on top of the culling of the Regional Development Agencies, which have been champions of low carbon innovations from electric vehicles to carbon capture and storage. It also follows the freezing (and possible axeing) of big capital projects, like rebuilding secondary schools, which could have served a low carbon procurement role.

Support to low carbon innovation is pretty small beer compared with the size of the deficit, but crucial not only to a deep cut in emissions, but also to the sustainable recovery we will need to deal with that deficit (the idea of cutting our way through it is not only bad economics but also a political fantasy). By comparison with potential competitors like South Korea, it looks as if we are sawing off the branch we are sitting on.

CCC - Cuts to low-carbon RD n D

An update on our most recent post – on Monday the UK’s independent statutory climate advisory group, the Climate Change Committee chaired by Adair Turner, brought out a new report on low carbon innovation. One of its main findings is that:

“Current levels of public expenditure for RD&D [research, development and deployment] should be regarded as a minimum and cuts would be detrimental to the achievement of our climate goals and the new Government’s objective to build a green economy. UK energy RD&D funding is low by international standards, and international funding is low relative to benchmarks proposed by the Stern Review, the IEA and the EU (e.g. IEA analysis suggests that a two to fivefold increase is required).”

The CCC estimates that current spending on low carbon RD&D in the UK is around £550 million, including spending by higher education research councils. this is a tiny amount in the context of this year’s deficit of over £150 billion. But more importantly it is the kind of investment in our future economy and environment that should be the last thing to go.

Sad then, that the CCC report came out three days after the cuts we outlined in Monday’s post.

The Politics of Climate Change … Again

If the Australian electorate used last week’s poll to speak out on climate change, it certainly did not do so without equivocation.

With three parliamentary seats left to fill with certainty, the results to date suggest a vote evenly split between the less climate friendly Coalition and the more climate friendly Australian Labor Party (ALP). The Greens have picked up only one seat and there are likely to be four independents, three of whom it seems will assume a king- or queen-maker role.

Prior to the election, pollsters seemed to agree that the ALP’s capitulation on climate change was likely to cost it support and that the Greens would be the major beneficiaries. However, while the Greens’ share of the vote has increased to 11.4 per cent (at the time of writing), it appears to be likely to fall short of a predicted 14 per cent. The party’s one seat will not hand it the balance of power. And the key independents, while progressive on climate change, have hardly foregrounded it as an issue in the list of demands submitted to the leaders of the ALP and the Coalition.

George Monbiot’s thoughtful piece on how climate change is still resolutely a left-right issue – in Australia and in the US – disappointingly falls back on the same old green explanation. He concludes by writing:

‘Yes, man-made climate change denial is about politics, but it’s more pragmatic than ideological. The politics have been shaped around the demands of industrial lobby groups, which happen, in many cases, to fund those who articulate them.’

For sure, both denialism and industry lobbying are important factors, but they too easily explain what is probably a highly seasoned and more complex hegemonic cauldron.

For instance, take a look at this Newspoll/The Australian ranking of issues that Australian voters said were important in the run up to the election (click on the ‘importance and best party to handle major issues’ link). In the two years since July 2008, climate change fell in importance by more than ten percentage points and at 23-25 July 2010 (i.e. immediately prior to the election) was ranked only eighth, with healthcare, education, the economy and other usual suspect issues taking the top slots.

This could all be part of a fiendish plot by industry, whose capture of the media and politics subtly commands the views of voters. However, it could also be that even in Australia, where severe drought and staggeringly destructive bush fires have offered a prescient glimpse of a world under a changed climate, voters still put more immediate interests first.

So can the three independents change the climate of politics in Australia. ippr’s friends at The Climate Institute think they can. However, as a leader in The Australian seeks to remind them:

‘… as they say in the southern United States, the independents should dance with the one who brung them. They will be held responsible for the choice they are about to make between Labor and the Coalition and could find themselves out of a job in three years, or sooner, if their constituents disagree.’

In other words, electoral politics are the ones that in the end matter to politicians. If on climate change the electorate does not speak or does not speak unequivocally, then it’s hard to see how politicians can respond with the kind of vigour required of them.

Do the right thing?

I have been reading Michael Sandel’s recent book, Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? Sandel is currently hot property on the centre left in the UK. He gave the prestigious Reith Lectures in 2009, and his argument for a ‘politics of the common good’ has hit a chord amongst politicians like Ed Miliband.

At the heart of Sandel’s philosophy is the rejection of two foundations for politics – utilitarianism (do the thing that produces the maximum happiness) and liberalism (do the thing that allows people to do what they want). Sandell argues that instead, politics should be moral in nature (building on the principle of Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’) and that they should be about the ultimate purpose of institutions (building on Aristotle).

Here I am interested particularly in the implications of a Kantian perspective. Kant says that politics should be built on moral arguments. We should do things because they are right, according to rules that are consistent when applied to everyone, and built on a notion of human dignity and rationality. Equally, we should not do things that are morally wrong. Crucially, this means that what matters is not outcomes (i.e. happiness or freedom), but motives.

What does this approach say about the politics of climate change? First of all, a moral foundation may be helpful simply because the alternatives are problematic. The utilitarian case for tackling climate change (for example, the Stern Review’s argument that it will cost us less to do something than to do nothing) is weakened in practice by the fact that the costs of doing something need to be borne today and in the North, whereas the benefits will be largest in the future and in the South.

If the utilitarian argument for climate action is weak in practice, the liberal argument is positively unhelpful, since positive freedoms (I should be allowed to drive my car whenever I like) always tend in practice to drown out negative freedoms (I should be allowed to live free from the threat of flooding, drought etc).

However, the moral basis for action on climate change is not without its complications. This is partly because when we emit carbon, we are not doing something wrong in Kant’s terms. Our motive is not to harm others. Even Jeremy Clarkson is not suggesting you drive a large, fast car for the express purposes of damaging humanity – he is a classic libertarian and just wants to have his idea of fun. So there is a problem with an environmentalism (or humanism) that says our current actions are morally wrong – probably one reason why people tend to react strongly against such suggestions.

On the other hand, wanting to cut your emissions because it is the right thing to do (as opposed to feeling good about yourself, or even because it will benefit others) is a consistent moral position. So why don’t more people do it? Why, for example, don’t more people give up eating meat, which would cut emissions but requires no major action by governments? When Nick Stern suggested this last year he was ridiculed.

This is where Sandel’s political argument comes in. He is saying that politics (especially Democratic politics in the US and by extension New Labour politics here) has in the past relied too much on utilitarian or liberal arguments. The Left needs to learn from the Right, which since the 1970s has grounded politics in morality (it is interesting that there are even some on the Right who urge climate action on moral grounds, usually expressed in terms of religious morality). Politicians who believe in tackling climate change need to start speaking up for doing the right thing.

This is an interesting and appealling argument. However, it faces the major challenge, especially in the US but even to some extent in the UK, of the growth of a libertarian populism – the emergence of what Mark Lilla calls anti-political Jacobins, who distrust not only governments but all public institutions and intellectuals like Stern, while believing firmly in themselves. If Lilla is right, the essential problem for politicians (or environmental leaders) seeking to make a moral argument for cutting emissions is getting a hearing in the first place.

Can Climate Campaigns Reach 9 Million MPH?

In haste, but because we were recently asked by a climate campaigner friend; can there be a Make Poverty History (MPH) campaign for climate change?

From memory, MPH persuaded its supporters in the UK to take more than 9 million separate actions (please correct us if our memory is errant) in the run up to Gleneagles G8 summit in 2005. These included sending postcards and text messages to leaders, signing petitions and taking part in a succession of campaigning events and protests.

Whether or not this huge amount of activity ultimately achieved its ends is a question for another day. The MPH evaluation is here, in case you’re interested. But attempts by campaigning groups focussing on climate change to recreate MPH’s level of fervour – notably in the UK through the Stop Climate Chaos (SCC) campaign – have fallen short of the mark and have tended only to engage the ‘green wedge’ who were already engaged anyway.

We’ve been involved in or closely observed both MPH and climate campaigns and we think there are two principal reasons why an MPH for climate has proven elusive.

First, climate change is a very different issue. One of the most oft quoted stastitics during MPH was that a child in the developing world dies every three seconds as a result of extreme poverty. The evidence base for this number was a matter of some dispute, but it stuck. By contrast, the world of climate campaigning is a miasma of numbers: 450 or 350ppm, 2 degrees, 50 per cent, 80 per cent etc. These sometimes get related to terrible things that might happen in the future, but this doesn’t seem to have the same impact on the public.

One international development agency, Christian Aid, did try to put a human face to climate impacts, but in its associated asks (turn the lights off at the office, turn the thermostat down etc) this campaign seemed to suffer from the second reason why jumping from climate campaigning to MPH is difficult. The solutions to climate change are complex, costly and will have a direct impact on the lives of those whom campaign groups need to engage to be successful – i.e. the public in the rich world. The links between the actions of individuals or the setting by governments of targets for emissions reductions and climate impacts, such as the floods in Pakistan, are obscure, especially in comparison with the links between increasing aid or cutting debts and poverty reduction (even if in reality one does not necessarily beget the other). Plus successful UK action on climate change will directly reduce the household welfare of campaigners.

Of course, there are lots of other reasons why climate campaigning and MPH are different. For instance, MPH emerged from the Jubilee 2000 campaign, which meant development campaign groups had experience of working together; the environmental campaigning sector is apparently less cohesive.

There was also a lot of celebrity muscle behind MPH. Celebrities have been a lot less forthcoming in support of climate campaigns, perhaps because of fears of being caught out driving their Range Rover Sports to the supermarket.

For all the reasons we frequently highlight on this blog, politicians desperately need people’s consent in order to take action on climate change; it simply isn’t an issue on which either a narrow, green wedge of activism or bold leadership can take us as far as is necessary; we’ll simply fail more slowly. So what are the lessons from MPH that are helpful?

The axioms of popular campaigning usually require there to be a clear victim, a clear villain and a clear solution. We might need to tamper with these for successful climate campaigning. Apparently future generations are too distant as victim and government-set emissions caps and lifestyle changes are not cohesive and appealing enough as solutions. However, the biggest problem is that, much as we can point the finger at big oil, or lambast weak political leadership, climate change is a bugger of a campaign issue because the utlimate villain is…..us.

Never Mind The Targets, Feel The Stones

Here’s a post that might equally well be entitled ‘better late than never’; I’ve finally got around to looking at this year’s data from Bloomberg New Energy Finance contained within the UNEP-SEFI global trends report. It’s fascinating and puts in context the last post on this blog which focused on the demise of emissions target-setting.

New investment in sustainable energy globally fell by 7 per cent in 2009, compared to 2008, to a total of $162 billion. This should not cause major concern since levels of investment are highly likely to fluctuate considerably from year-to-year. It’s the average over time that matters and the UNEP report points out that this was still the second highest annual investment in sustainable energy on record.

But it’s the detail rather than the aggregate data that’s of interest. China is now the number one destination for sustainable energy finance and has knocked the US off the top slot. In 2009, China installed almost 14 gigawatts of wind power, into which investors put $27.2 billion of mostly asset finance. China’s current target for installing wind power in 2020 is 30GW but since 25.8GW has already been installed, this target now looks more than attainable and there is already talk in Beijing of hiking the target to 150GW. Remember ‘feeling the stones‘?

Not to labour the point, but China also now manufactures nearly one-third of the world’s solar panels; its Longyuan Power Group floated its solar business on the Hong Kong stock exchange in 2009, raising $2.6 billion in the process. In fact, while the raising of sustainable energy finance on public markets is still small beer, the story beneath the headline $14.1 billion total is the staggering 2984 per cent increase in activity in Hong Kong (clearly heavily influenced by Longyuan, but still significant at a time when the equities are pretty unfashionable).

For those struggling with leaden-footed UN negotiations, herein lies hope of real, tangible progress. Last year, Professor Jihua Pan and team at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in a study for the Global Climate Network, modeled the job creation potential of clean energy technologies. They found a possible one million job opportunities in China as a result of installing 150GW of wind power by 2020. Might that help with the politics?

Ultimately, success in tackling climate change will be measured in parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere and degrees of average global temperature increase. But at this point in time, never mind the grand targets; feel the stones.

Targets Debate ‘Largely Irrelevant’ says de Boer

To cries of ‘now you tell us,’ Yvo de Boer, the man perpetually dubbed ‘former UN climate chief’, has reportedly said ‘Discussions about [emissions] targets have become largely irrelevant in the context of the Copenhagen outcome.’ And, has reportedly also said,’ I don’t think that we’re going to see a dramatic increase in the level of ambition.’

His argument is one that will be familiar to regular readers of politicalclimate.net: Countries have made their best offers in the annexes to the Copenhagen Accord and are unlikely to revise upwards until political and economic conditions change. As we pointed out over on the Open Democracy website prior to Copenhagen, targets do not inexorably lead to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (although if there’s a process like the UK’s Climate Change Committee in place, they certainly help).

‘What matters, however, is not a new UN treaty annex full of “targets” – but actual policies, plans, programmes, measures, actions and national impetus to stop the growth of emissions.’

So, while it’s not necessarily a bad thing to have frequent reminders of the potential consequences of delivery against inadequate targets – although even that looks a tall order at the moment – it’s not likely to be a game changer. By that token, there must be better ways to use valuable time and resources than continually reinventing the same intractable targets debate or producing further analysis to show how inadequate the Copenhagen Accord targets are.

Instead, why not focus on ‘actual policies, plans, programmes, measures, actions and national impetus’. Winning the high and low politics means demonstrating that a country, region, city or community can decouple its prosperity and people’s quality of life from emissions growth. Citizens need to see the benefits of low carbon; governments need to be more confident that the green arrows don’t only point to the exit.

Monbiot and Climate Politics

In Today’s Guardian newspaper in the UK, environmental columnist George Monbiot has seemingly woken up to the politics of climate change – almost. He finishes a lengthy soliloquy to the global climate change negotiations and climate campaigning more generally with the following:

‘All I know is that we must stop dreaming about an institutional response that will never materialise and start facing a political reality we’ve sought to avoid. The conversation starts here.’

The conversation in fact began a while ago, notably over at the Breakthrough Institute in the US and in Anthony Giddens book. Here at Political Climate we’ve been trying to bring some of the thinking on climate politics together and to present some of the evidence to support a climate politics focus in addition to science and economics.

Monbiot falls short of naming precisely which politics he means, although mentions in passing the activities of corporate lobbyists, the customary bête noir of environmentalists, and the failure of leadership:

‘Greens are a puny force by comparison to industrial lobby groups, the cowardice of governments and the natural human tendency to deny what we don’t want to see.’

He also confuses the failure of an intergovernmental agreement, whose crime was to try and move ahead of national politics based on the assumption that leadership would win through, with government action in general. We still need governments and institutions to take climate change seriously, but not necessarily or primarily within the frame of a global agreement.

It’s hardly a revelation to say this, but climate change is a long-term problem that requires short-term responses; this paradox is shot through with politics. And so while polls suggest two-thirds or more of people accept the role of humans in changing the climate, they do not tend to prioritise it in the decisions they take at the checkout or, critically, at the ballot box. Thus while political and corporate rhetoric on the issue has become more shrill in recent years, costly investments to stem still-rising emissions have on the whole not been forthcoming.

Pushing for a grand, global agreement was a bold endeavour, but Monbiot is correct to observe that, at least for now, it is also a fruitless one as politicians justifiably feel that the space for high ambition is not yet available to them. That’s why we’ve been trying to identify the politics and championing the concept of learning by doing (see the previous post). It may not satisfy the carbon accountants and scenario geeks as much as top-down targets, but at least it’s concrete progress.

Monbiot and Climate Politics II

Our letter is published in today’s Guardian newspaper. You can read it here and below:

The Guardian, Letters, 23 September 2010.

Dear Sir

George Monbiot is right to highlight politics as the main blocker to action on climate change (Climate change enlightenment was fun while it lasted. But now it’s dead, 21 September). It’s only a shame it’s taken him and many others so long to recognise what the evidence has been saying for some time.

Climate change is a long-term problem that requires short-term responses. Polls suggest that about two-thirds of people accept the role of humans in changing the climate, but tend not to prioritise it when at the checkout or ballot box. Thus while political and corporate rhetoric has increased in recent years, there have been few costly investments in new technology.

Pushing for a grand, global agreement was a bold endeavour, but Monbiot is correct to observe that, at least for now, it is also a fruitless one, as politicians rightly feel the political space for high ambition is not yet available to them. That’s why on our politicalclimate.net blog we’ve been championing the concept of learning by doing things. It may not satisfy the carbon accountants and scenario geeks as much as top-down targets, but at least it’s concrete progress.

Worried floaters

Blogging from the Labour Party Conference in Manchester, Political Climate has picked up on some new polling by YouGov for Policy Network. This survey was aimed at getting the Labour Party to understand how voters see it, but it also has some interesting insights for the politics of climate change.

The findings on floating voters, especially white collar (C1) and skilled manual (C2) workers, describe a contrast with 1992, when this group was aspirant and upwardly mobile. Today, according to the survey, they are worried, prioritising security and a better future for their children. 59% of respondents felt that the next generation would be the same or worse off than them. Only 37% were confident of a good standard of living in retirement. These voters feel insecure and vulnerable. Wages have been stagnant for the last few years, and many have taken on large amounts of debt.

There are important lessons for wider progressive politics here, but also for thinking about climate politics. Floating voters want politicians to focus on their needs, and they want them to demonstrate economic competence. It is riskier than ever to give a central place to an environmental issues like climate change and appear distracted.

An obvious response is to put low-carbon growth to the fore, with the emphasis on jobs and investment (and indeed the coalition government has just claimed 250,000 jobs will be created in a huge housing retrofit programme). However, our own polling evidence shows that the public is not yet convinced about the ‘green jobs’ pitch, and don’t trust politicians on it. This may change over time, but only if a virtuous cycle of real job creation and bolder, job-creating policies can be established. The coalition are talking the talk, but not yet walking it.

UPDATE

As Steve Glynn suggests in his comment, the other response should be to try to make action on climate change part of narrative about a more secure future. But this will require some care; it will be easy to make people feel more insecure, not less, and such a narrative really needs to be credible and convincing.

FURTHER UPDATE

For our survey findings on the green jobs frame, go the “Writing” page of the website and look at the “Climate of Opinion” document.

Borrowing from the future

Like a lot of other European governments, Britain’s still relatively new coalition leaders are keen on fiscal austerity, and this week will see a spending review that is expected to lay out cuts of over £65 billion over the next 6 years. The ostensible reason for all this slashing is the UK’s national debt, which has reached £1,000 billion (over 70% of GDP). Against this background, it may sound mad to argue for more public borrowing in order to pay for investments in low carbon technologies and infrastructure, but that is what I am going to do in this post.

Let’s start with the rationale. The argument is most fully developed by US economist Duncan Foley, but is also made by Nick Stern of the LSE. The starting point is that in advanced economies successive generations tend to get better off over time. For example, at the depths of the 1930s depression Keynes observed that despite the general gloom, he was confident that 100 years in the future, people might be eight times better off in real terms. And indeed average GDP per capita in the UK is now already about 5 times what it was in the 1930s. By extension, we would normally expect future generations to be better off than us in GDP terms.

However, the sting is in the tail, i.e. the “GDP terms”. GDP takes no account of the running down of ecological systems on which the economy depends, sometimes referred to by economists as “natural capital”. By pumping CO2 and other GHGs into the atmosphere, we are running down the natural capital of a stable climate and sea levels, at a rate we do not fully understand. Thus once we take climate change into account, we can expect future generations to be a lot less well off than we thought.

The converse of this point is that, if we in this generation mitigate climate change, we will allow future generations to have a higher standard of living than they would have if we did nothing. We are very slowly beginning to do this, with policies being introduced to encourage us to invest less in conventional capital (e.g. fossil fuel power stations) and more in investments that effectively maintain natural capital (like renewable energy).

At the moment we are paying for these more expensive investments through reduced consumption, in the form of higher energy bills. If instead we were to borrow a certain amount of money from future generations (who will have to repay through their taxes) and use this money to pay the extra cost of renewables, carbon capture and storage and so on, then the theory says it should be possible to make both our generation and future generations better off. Politicans often focus on the fact that incurring public debt burdens future generations. But destroying the natural capital of a stable climate will burden them even more.

Note that only long-term public borrowing can do this, being the Heineken of climate finance. If a bank finances, say, a large renewable energy project, it will want all its money back, with interest, within 10-15 years. By contrast, long term government debt will pay interest but the principal may not be paid back for periods of over 50 years.

Fine in principle, you may say, but arguing for more debt in current circumstances is surely pointless. Not quite, for two main reasons.

The first is that we have a heavy debt burden and a large deficit now, but this will not always be the case, and climate change is a long term problem. At the same time, the additional borrowing required will not be very large, especially in the next few years. The average cost per year to 2020 is equivalent to less than 3% of the current deficit, and it will be much smaller than that before 2015.

The second is that reducing the deficit quickly risks recession, and a key way to avoid this risk is to offset the contraction in consumption with an increase in investment (as Martin Wolf at the Financial Times has been arguing) – especially since the UK, like many countries, has under-invested in infrastructure for many years. Borrowing to invest in assets is very different from borrowing to cover a structural deficit, and should be part of the growth strategy that will be needed as part of the strategy for dealing with the deficit problem.

Two final points. Beyond the economic logic, borrowing from the future would help with the politics. Paying for everything through energy bills is not only politically risky, but also highly regressive and unfair to poorer people in richer countries.

The second point is about time. A while back we argued that finance for adaptation should come from a tax on wealth accumulated from previous generations who had (albeit unknowingly) over-invested in carbon-heavy assets. This idea of borrowing from the future to help pay for mitigation is the other side of the same coin. Both are about recognising that solving the climate change problem has a deep time structure.

No Pressure

We’re pretty skeptical about the political reach of the 10:10 campaign. But, thinking back to our recent post comparing Make Poverty History to climate campaigning, 10:10 is more akin to the wide and shallow nature of the former than the narrow and often unpalatably deep characteristics of the latter.

No surprise, then, that this morning, 10:10 unveiled a video that came right out of the MPH stables – made by Richard Curtis, no less. Right now, the 10:10 campaign is frantically trying to back pedal from its association with this video (so note that our link above may not work by the time you click on it).

‘No Pressure’, the title of the film, seems to have won few friends on either side of the climate debate and also to have attracted enemies. It has been derided by 350.org’s Bill McKibben, writing on the almost never funny and frequently maniacal Climate Progress. It has been branded eco-fascism by James Delingpole in the UK’s Telegraph, but then one should never take Delingpole’s pronouncements at face value. He’s what’s know as a humourist in polite circles and a piss-taker elsewhere.

Why the fuss? The ‘No Pressure’ video features four scenarios in which people who fail to make emissions-reducing pledges are blown up, scattering their entrails across the faces and clothing of classmates, colleagues and teammates. It’s tasteless and gory, for sure. And frankly, after the first scenario, it becomes a little tedious.

McKibben’s beef is that the film fulfills the beliefs of climate denialists that the environment movement is zealous and interested only in destroying its detractors rather than debating with them; that’s a bit literal, even for an uber-green. Delingpole thinks ‘No Pressure’ is evidence that the green movement is zealous and interested only in destroying its detractors. He must be taking the piss.

If you can track it down, you can make up your own mind. It’s possible that the humour in the film – and it’s not that funny – doesn’t translate well in the US. Taken at face value, it certainly does appear to say ‘if you don’t back 10:10 then you don’t deserve to live’, but it’s safe to assume that Curtis’s intention was to poke fun at green self righteousness and make climate campaigning amusing for once while delivering the 10:10 message.

The trouble with environmentalism, rather exposed by this episode, is that it really does take itself terribly seriously and yet as research suggests, preaching won’t win mainstream audiences; Age of Stupid is stupid because its point of departure is to brand its audience stupid. ‘No Pressure’ isn’t funny enough to defend. But it is at least an attempt to bring levity instead of jute into the environmental debate.

UPDATE

Perhaps Delingpole’s second hypothesis in this list is the correct analysis, although he doesn’t seem to think so. Also, several years ago, the creators of Modern Toss produced a couple of moderately funny video virals on climate change for the development charity Christian Aid. Here’s one of them. The Guardian has also in the past tried to assemble a roll call of climate change humour, without much success.

Borrow to invest?

Last month we argued that, despite the Coalition Government’s obsession with cutting the deficit, we should be using public borrowing to pay for the additional costs of a low carbon infrastructure. Seems like someone agrees with us – over at Left Foot Forward, Gerry Holtham has been arguing something very similar. As he puts it:

“Public debt is less of a problem if there is a counterpart growth of assets yielding a return. The current deficit largely finances consumption. Yet the UK faces a potential energy crisis and has a decrepit infrastructure and should reduce carbon emissions. The investment in tidal and nuclear energy and the creation of electrified high-speed rail links and better roads would cost hundreds of billions. There is no better time to undertake such investments than when the economy is faced with persistent under-utilization of resources. The government should catalyse and finance such investment.”

The 12 commandments of climate strategy

Earlier this year, Stephen Hale – head of the UK’s Green Alliance network of companies and NGOs - left for a new life in Geneva working for Oxfam International. His parting shot was a pamphlet called The New Commandments of Climate Change Strategy: How to cut emissions and win elections too. We think that it’s very good, and didn’t get enough attention at the time, so we’re urging people to go back and have another look.

This slightly Biblical-sounding pamphlet (is Stephen casting himself as the Moses of climate policy?) looking at what governments should do is a follow-up to his 2008 New Politics of Climate Change, which looks at what civil society should do.

Both start with an excellent diagnosis of the political barriers at the heart of climate policy. The New Commandments is of course post-Copenhagen, and so starts with the need for a “fundamental reappraisal” in its wake, to recognise that too much hope was invested in global processes, and to realise that ”the real challenge is implementation, not negotiation”. (Some of us were actually saying that well before Copenhagen, but were dismissed by the same climate “big beasts” and funders who thought then that the science and marginal abatement cost curves would swing it, and who are now equally sure that they know what to do. But that’s another blog post).

Like an increasing number of people post-Copenhagen, Hale argues that we now need to look to policies and action at the national level in developed countries to make a global agreement effective. But for this to happen, two things are needed – first, a coherent mitigation strategy (“Too many ministers and officials are working long hours on new initiatives without clear strategic framework for action” – Stephen should know about this as an ex-adviser to several British ministers), and second, “far deeper political support for action that will make these strategies politically sustainable”. For as he says in the conclusion, “Climate policy is intrinsically political, with potentially significant and controversial impacts on markets, vested interests and individuals.”

What’s really nice about the pamphlet is that it has that all-too-rare quality that the recommendations (or “commandments” in this case!) do actually follow on from the analysis. Particularly important, in our view, is getting the politics right (or at least better) on national action, where his proposals include a good narrative and some real action on climate-related jobs and investments; some early wins that cut costs, especially on energy efficiency, and finding the losers and helping them, which will include not only poor households but also energy intensive high-carbon industries.

He also has sensible things to say on how governments need to be more joined up (both across departmental silos and across different levels – national, regional and local), and on how we should be using regulation more and relying less exclusively on market-based mechanisms , like cap-and-trade schemes.

Finally, we agree with Stephen when he says that, although the centre-left in the developed world has so far tended to show more concern and commitment to action on climate, they have not so far been very successful (and actually some argue that by framing that commitment in terms of climate change they have lost votes).

A lot of what is in The New Commandments has been or is being said by others (including us), but it brings it all together in a clear, accessible and above all succinct way, just right for the minister or special adviser to read in a quiet moment. I wonder how many have?

What’s the deal with Cancún?

After Copenhagen, getting the COP to agree on almost anything would have seemed an achievement, so it’s worth taking the outcome of COP 16 in Cancún – reported by many as a ‘deal’ – with a pinch of salt. Of course, not having more than 100 world leaders present probably helped by taking the weight off the UN’s shoulders. But without heads of government, political commitment to the process and its Mexican outcomes cannot be assumed.

Sleep Deprivation is probably playing a part in the somewhat dizzy response that’s emerging from Mexico. The Guardian’s ‘The Deal LIVE‘ is a good example. A more sober assessment of the implications comes from Fred Pearce on the News Scientist’s website.

The big picture of course is that no government of a major economy has gone any further in terms of pledges to reduce emissions, but then Political Climate is a sceptic on emissions targets anyway. Domestic politics are simply not in place to facilitate more ambition and that’s unlikely to change for some time.

It certainly is good that some of the modalities for a Green Fund have been agreed. Regardless of the justice-based arguments for transfers from developed to developing countries, a cornerstone-type fund and government guarantees will be needed to crowd in investment from the private sector for highly capital-intensive clean energy.

Having a pot for money does not, however, guarantee that it will be filled. It’s hard not to be pessimistic in this regard; the Advisory Group on Finance’s report more or less rules out the carbon-related sources of ‘innovative’ finance upon which many have been pinning their hopes; a quick glance at the real world reveals creeping financial contagion in Europe and a hidebound US president who may have to spend money on maintaining Bush’s tax cuts for wealthy Americans. Where is the green fund’s capital going to come from?

Technology scarcely gets a mention in any of the coverage of the outcome of COP 16. However, it could be the pick of the decisions. In particular, establishing a centre to match technology needs with suppliers – fulfilling an important market information role, if it works – will actually help cut emissions.

The decision on the Kyoto Protocol pastes over the cracks that appeared in the earlier stages of COP 16; these will reappear in Durban next year.

The climate world is divided into those who think the KP is the best thing that’s ever happened in climate policy and those that think it’s useless. In fact, the evidence is mixed. Even the EU has only really managed to stay on track by importing hot air through its expansion. However, the KP’s very existence appears to have led to a large expansion in the patenting of clean technologies both within and outside its jurisdiction.

Of course, Political Climate’s main concern remains the weak support for action on climate change and lack of consent for climate policy in many nations and these factors haven’t changed. Some progress has been made in Cancún, but only really by avoiding some of the crunch issues and pretending once again that the UNFCCC process is not quite part of the real world.

UPDATE: It may be worse than we thought. The Mexican COP ‘deal’ seems to have lent fresh momentum to the treaty bandwagon. See this as an example.

After Cancun: Where next for climate politics

By Nick Pearce, Director of ippr.

Expectations are low for Cancun. As Tim Wirth and John Podesta at the Center for American Progress – one of ippr’s partners in the Global Climate Network – put it, negotiators may ‘start to pivot toward a new strategy of gradualism’. On the Cancun agenda is how countries can be transparent in achieving emissions reductions, the introduction of credits for preserving forests into carbon markets, and the transfer of finance from rich to poor countries to help cover climate costs. Off the agenda is a comprehensive, legally binding climate treaty of the kind that was so spectacularly not agreed in Copenhagen this time last year.

The juxtaposition of the climate talks and the icy weather across most of northern Europe is important because, while the relationship between climate and weather is dynamic rather than direct, cold winters and failing global negotiations are both likely to weaken public support for action on climate change.

In fact, in terms of average global temperature 2010 is likely to be either the hottest or second-hottest year in the instrumental records. But it began and is apparently ending with unusually heavy snowfall and biting cold in some of the locations in which winning the political arguments really matter.

In the UK, 71 per cent of people are very or fairly concerned about climate change, down from 77 per cent in 2008 and 82 per cent in 2005 but nevertheless still indicative of the fact that most people are neither climate denialists nor swayed by a spell of cold weather.

But there is a deeper malaise in the way people view environmental problems that may help explain the impasse in international climate talks. In isolation, people express concern about climate change, but in comparison with other issues, the environment is a high priority for only a minority of people. For instance, in an ippr poll conducted before the UK elections, fewer than one in five people in marginal constituencies rated climate change among the top three or four issues on which they would base their choice at the ballot box.

Concern about other issues, such as the economy, spikes sharply in response to real-world events. Unlike many green issues – especially climate change – they are of immediate and visceral concern. The graph below from Ipsos MORI illustrates this point perfectly.

If the public – even in the relatively climate-friendly UK – prioritises the economy over climate change then how reasonable is it to expect governments, especially at a time of economic strife, to sign up to an ambitious climate agreement that sets potentially costly new emissions targets?

Environmentalists argue that comparing climate change with other issues is a ‘category error’ because the potential consequences of global warming are so profound and serious. Unfortunately, in reality the public see it differently – they are concerned about climate change, but they are much more concerned about other issues. So rather than shroud-waving on climate change, it would make more sense to start building arguments for climate action that sit much closer to the immediate concerns of voters.

In the chill of a London December, it is difficult to see the Cancun talks ending in anything more positive than the avoidance of complete failure. Progressives have hitherto pinned their hopes on international negotiations to deliver the step-change that’s needed in our approach to climate change. Perhaps it’s time to turn our focus to the domestic stage and to the task of defining how a fairer, more secure and growing economy can also be a low-carbon economies.

This post first appeared on Nick’s ippr blog. Please accept our continued apologies for the ongoing problems with the appearance of this blog. We are gradually resolving them.

Getting real about energy

A thought-provoking piece from Michael Shellenberger at the Breakthough Institute in the US landed in my inbox this morning, which I thought was worth reproducing in full here, not least because it expresses very well some of the dilemmas that the UK faces as it struggles to catch up with the rest of Europe in investments in renewable energy:

“For forty years, presidents and policymakers have promised and planned for a new energy future just over the horizon. While the rationales have varied — reducing dependence on imported oil, stopping global warming, reducing air pollution, creating clean energy jobs — the song has largely remained the same: America has most, if not all, of the technologies needed today to make a quick and relatively painless transition away from fossil fuels.

Yet America is more dependent upon fossil fuels than ever before. U.S. oil consumption rose from 15 to 20 million barrels a day between 1970 and today, while coal still provides about 50 percent of our electricity. U.S. carbon emissions continue to rise unabated, as efforts to cap them have repeatedly foundered in the face of daunting political, economic, and technological obstacles. And renewable technologies like wind and solar only meet a tiny fraction of America’s energy needs despite several decades of efforts to subsidize their deployment.

When experts convene in Washington today, December 15, to discuss energy policy at the Energy Innovation 2010 conference, they will do so in the wake of yet another failed federal effort to pass legislation to support a transition away from fossil fuel-based energy.

A Reality-Based Energy Conversation

Just a few short years ago, prominent venture capitalists and technology companies promised to unleash an energy technology revolution, claiming that they were developing new technologies that would transform the global energy economy in the same way computers, microchips, and the Internet had transformed information and communications just a decade earlier. Wall Street analysts were talking up clean tech as the next major growth sector of the global economy. And policymakers promised millions of new “green” jobs and tens of billions of dollars in net exports.

Things did not turn out as planned. Federal stimulus investments, which saved the renewables industry during the financial crisis, are set to expire. Clean tech firms are in trouble, with Wall Street rushing to short clean tech stocks. Carbon pricing in Europe has failed to unleash the expected revolution in the continent’s energy economy. And both international and domestic efforts to cap or price carbon emissions are in shambles. Clean energy advocates should be chastened at the consequences of counting on a two-year stimulus program and carbon pricing from cap and trade to suffice as an innovation program. Innovation demands public support for investment and takes anywhere from years to decades, not months.

The promise of a clean, secure, and prosperous energy future continues to disappoint because it has been, for four decades, premised on the notion that the technologies necessary to deliver that future are close at hand. They are not. And until U.S. policymakers come to terms with that reality and reconfigure U.S. energy policy centrally around energy technology innovation, such hopes will remain pyrrhic.

An Honest Appraisal of Costs and Benefits

Now that sky-high clean tech promises have fallen back to earth, we can paint a more accurate and nuanced picture of the potential national security, economic, health, and safety benefits for the United States and the world. Fossil energy has provided wondrously cheap energy to power human civilization, but not without significant negative consequences, including roughly two million air pollution deaths, 2,000 coal mining deaths, and hundreds of oil and gas deaths annually. And for the United States, its heavy reliance on imported oil has acute economic and security costs.

Transporting and defending fuel for the military conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq costs America every day in both dollars and lives. Energy is thus already a big area of concern for the DoD. New energy sources would enable our defense forces more flexibility and less risk on the battlefield and off.

Cheaper, cleaner energy at home and abroad will also help the U.S. economy. At home, over $250 billion of America’s $380 billion trade deficit in 2009 was from imported oil. If Beyond displacing oil imports, if the United States could lead in the production of clean energy products and services, we would create more good jobs and exports.

Abroad, fossil energy is too expensive for about two billion humans, who still rely on wood and dung as their main sources of energy. Billions more consume far too little energy. Rising energy consumption is strongly correlated with longer life spans, improved health, and higher incomes. That wealth is in America’s interests, as it creates demand for American products and reduces low-wage competition.

Energy innovation is also in our environmental interest. There are many environmental benefits that include, but also go well beyond, reducing global warming and air pollution. Coal mining, for example, devastates mountains, many have been destroyed entirely. Meanwhile, parts of the Nigerian Delta, the Ecuadoran rainforest, and the Gulf of Mexico have been harshly impacted by oil spills.

In fact, one need not believe that global warming poses any risk at all in order to support an energy innovation agenda in the United States and elsewhere.

Real World Innovation

How, then, can we get it done? The new conversation about energy innovation begins from the recognition that the cost and functionality gap between today’s fossil energy and its alternatives remains wide, and that any serious effort to move away from fossil energy requires closing it – not through unsustainable subsidies to reduce prices, but through innovation that will drive down the real cost of clean energy.

Fossil fuels are dense, dispatchable, and widely available. Renewables are intermittent, less dense, and expensive. The latest Energy Information Administration (EIA) numbers show that electricity from new on-shore wind remains about 50 percent more expensive than coal. Electricity from new utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) power plants and solar thermal power plants are five and three times more expensive, respectively, than new natural gas power plants. Battery powered cars cost more to produce than those fueled by gasoline. Nuclear plants offer base-load power and provide relatively low-cost power in other countries, but the industry has stalled in the U.S. as big new plants have proved to be unacceptably expensive, requiring more affordable alternative models.

As such, a new energy policy needs to be based on driving down costs and improving the performance of these energy alternatives. Scientific and technological breakthroughs will likely be required before clean energy alternatives can compete, unaided by subsidies, with petroleum and coal.

But these breakthroughs will be insufficient without public-private partnerships for a national clean energy innovation policy. Numerous “market failures,” including high levels of uncertainty, technology path dependency, and spillovers from research, necessitate clean energy policy that must include larger, sustained, and strategic public investment to achieve critical breakthroughs.

Throughout American history, aggressive government procurement, research, and innovation efforts have delivered a pantheon of remarkable technologies, from the basic technologies of the iPhone, GPS, radar, the Internet, cancer-fighting drugs, and jet turbines. Against the widespread perception that American energy funding has been nothing more than an extended bureaucratic disaster, from Synfuels to ethanol, consider the critical role played by government-funded electrification, hydro-electric power, nuclear power, solar power, wind power and natural gas turbines.

How can we use military-style procurement to accelerate energy innovation? What can we learn from NIH’s funding of cancer research? What can we learn from over a century and a half of agricultural research? What’s the right mix of support for government research vs. private sector research?

A new energy innovation framework would also recognize that each low-carbon technology is on its own path and innovation policies should vary accordingly. For years the orthodoxy has been that “governments shouldn’t pick winners and losers,” and while there is important truth to this admonition, there is also danger in it. The truth is that we should not pick specific technologies and firms, i.e. choosing to support a particular kind of solar panel or battery technology. We should, however, be supporting broad technology areas, from nuclear to solar to batteries and biofuels, with specific investments. What do we need to accelerate the development of solar, batteries and biofuels — and what do nuclear and carbon capture and storage require?

Finally, the new energy conversation also raises questions about whether to invest in immediate deployment or longer-term innovation, as well as the relationship between the two. A focus exclusively or even largely on subsidizing the deployment of current technologies risks locking in existing suboptimal technologies while limiting innovation for both improved and breakthrough technologies. Deploying new technologies can improve their performance and drive down their cost — but not always. Subsidies for production — of corn ethanol, solar, nuclear, and wind — may in fact create an advantage for firms to produce more of today’s technologies, not invent tomorrow’s advanced new ones.

But likewise, an exclusive focus on the development of improved and breakthrough technologies risks separating the valuable link whereby development is informed by the challenges of deployment. A truly comprehensive energy policy is mindful of the need to keep this balance, to ensure a minimal private-sector industrial base in clean technology upon which a clean economy could be built in the future. Still, in many cases we would do better concentrating more federal support on incentives to create advanced technologies that have the potential to become much cheaper than today’s mass-produced ones.

Many energy advocates understandably focus on what can be done in the short-term, in the next Congress, but the important conversation is about what can be done over the long-term. Many of America’s most important technology projects spanned presidencies and Congresses, just as they crossed party lines. This was the case with armaments and agriculture in the 19th Century. In the 20th century, Eisenhower started and Kennedy continued microchip and other military procurement of advanced communications technologies. Nixon turned America’s biowarfare program into a medical research program, and a Republican Congress in the late 1990s increased NIH funding with the cooperation of a Democratic president.

Conclusion

America is built around innovation. We expect innovation. We drive innovation. And we experience innovation. Everywhere that is, except in energy. For the most part, we still use the same fuels in our cars and our electricity generation that we did a century ago. In no other area of our economy would Americans accept such stasis.

It’s time to change that. It’s time to drive energy innovation. Even though fossil energy has been critical to security and prosperity for more than a century, during the 21st century we can and need to do better with newer, cleaner technologies. America has a longstanding commitment to moving toward cleaner sources of energy, whether natural gas and nuclear or solar and wind. But this commitment needs to be stronger, and more strategically built around particular technology pathways and policies focused on innovation. And this effort should be undertaken patiently, with an eye to create real bipartisan agreement that lasts for decades, not years.”