Apocalypse later

The need to fight climate change is often presented in apocalyptic terms: action now or environmental chaos in a few decades. As the clock ticks we may need, however, to come up with a more pressing motivation.

Because whatever questions there are about climate science, it is clear that the hard questions are about the politics of climate change. If fear of apocalypse, distant from voters' lifetimes, is the best we can come up with, there will never be an adequate sense of political obligation for action.

This week London hosted the Major Economies Forum, a conference for the countries responsible for 80 per cent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. The meeting was expected to give a reliable pointer as to whether December's UN summit on climate change, to be held in Copenhagen, will be a success or whether the EU's ambition has to be scaled back.

That would be the ambition to have a global treaty to combat climate change, in which all major economies, including the US, India and China, commit themselves to binding targets on cuts in carbon emissions, so that by 2050 emissions would have been cut by 80 per cent compared with 1990 levels.

Although Gordon Brown's host government pushed the line that the world has 50 days in which to set the decisive course for 2050, the discussions at the London meeting, described as "robust" by the President Barack Obama's climate envoy, suggest that the original treaty is unlikely to be signed in Copenhagen.

No treaty will be workable without the participation of the US, China and India. However, President Obama has already indicated that he may not be in a position to sign an agreement before 2010: he needs approval from Congress, whose members face elections in November next year. Even if the majority of Representatives and Senators facing re-election shared their President's commitment to the 2050 target - and it is not clear that the majority does - they are unlikely to find it useful for their re-election prospects to declare this before the November vote.

China has repeatedly rejected the idea of binding targets, or indeed the principle that it should scale back its economic growth in order to reach the 2050 target. Although it has overtaken the US in total emissions, it has a population roughly four times as large. Historically, it has contributed far less to greenhouse gases. Today, its contribution has increased significantly because it produces carbon-intensive goods for Western consumers.

As for India, while its government has recently indicated that it would be prepared to set itself targets, there seems to be an internal argument over this between the environment ministry and the economic wing of the civil service.

Sermons about impending apocalypse are unlikely to shift national positions. They ignore the fact that transition to a new economic dispensation - a low- carbon, competitive economy - is complicated by the risk of three kinds of deficit.

First, most obviously, there is the risk, if the transition is managed at too slow a pace, of a growing environmental deficit that is handed down to future generations.

Second, there is the danger of an energy deficit for present generations. The transition to a low- carbon economy - the development of the technology and infrastructure of low-carbon and non-hydrocarbon alternatives - cannot be effected at a speed that keeps up with the rise in global demand for energy; demand for fossil fuels will continue to rise. If an energy shortfall is to be avoided, the transition must somehow have policies capable of both increasing incentives for investment in renewable sources of energy and removing disincentives for fossil fuels in sectors needed for growth.

Third, there is the danger of a fiscal deficit handed down to future generations if the transition to renewables is over-subsidised. The idea of quick-starting the transition with massive state investment in a "Green New Deal" is attractive. But great care needs to be taken to ensure that a technology-driven bubble is not mistaken for an economic miracle; where massive state investment in job creation and subsidies that hugely inflate share value, create tariff deficits and junk bonds that would be inherited by future generations and governments. The case of Spain, sometimes held up as a model of a "new industrial revolution", suggests that the foregoing considerations and opportunity costs need to be weighed very carefully.

There is a seeming contradiction between the interests of future generations, on the one hand, and those of the present generation, for whom a drastically rapid change in patterns of energy consumption would, in destabilising patterns of production, consumption and accustomed lifestyle, threaten the identity of their societies. In this sense, "apocalypse" is threatened by the action taken to prevent disastrous climate change, not by the climate itself.

What is needed is not a rhetoric of fear but a rhetoric of human solidarity that makes the economic transition, and its sacrifices, morally compelling and transparently worth undergoing. Whether it is available, in time, is the big question of our age.

In some quarters, the "end of ideology" used to be a boast. Today, it seems a pity. For we seem incapable of envisioning any alternative better world to the highly flawed, polluted one we inhabit.

ranierfsadni@europe.com