The Guardian View On The Climate Change Summit: There Is No Planet B

The Guardian - Editorial

The world’s hopes for a sustainable future depend on what happens in Paris over the next two weeks

Environmentalist activists in Berlin on the eve of the climate change summit in Paris. Photograph: Stefan Boness/Ipon/SIPA

The current front-runner for best slogan for the Paris climate change summit has to be “there is no planet B”; as for images, it is hard to imagine one more potent than the thousands of pairs of shoes laid in tidy lines in the Place de la République that symbolise the march climate activists had scheduled for Sunday then banned for fear of a repeat of the terrorist attack of a fortnight ago. However equivocal some of the political leadership sometimes appears, the popular movement for greening the economy is in good heart.
This is the 21st UN conference of the parties on climate change, better known as COP, and there are signs of a new maturity that might be the best omen for the future. It is easy to forget that this is an unprecedented attempt at global cooperation, one which has not only moved from event to process, but from protest to movement. For Paris is not only about world leaders trying to find an agreement acceptable to nearly 200 countries for whom the consequences of global warming will be existentially different. It is now also about the place of non-state players, from the indigenous peoples of South America to the world’s most sophisticated cities, and from the individual decisions that each of us makes to the clean energy initiative being launched on Monday by one of the world’s richest men, Bill Gates. One sign of this maturity is the demand from Laurent Fabius, the French foreign affairs minister in charge of this COP, that a deal on a final text should be agreed by next weekend. That would mean the last week of the conference was spent discussing how to put the final communiqué into action.
But there remain highly contentious decisions still to be taken, key wording left in square brackets in the 20-page negotiating text: including the date when carbon emissions peak, the amount of money available to help vulnerable countries adjust to the impact of changing climate, and the assistance available for developing countries that are still heavily reliant on fossil fuels.
The EU has agreed a joint target backed by nationally agreed pledges. Otherwise, engaging countries individually in drawing up their own plans for the speed and scale at which they will cut carbon emissions allows political realities of the kind that have beset both President Obama and successive Australian governments to be accommodated. Critics argue that it risks legitimising foot-dragging, and that is another of the great challenges for the coming fortnight: agreeing a process for monitoring, evaluating and verifying the targets that countries are signing up to – and then putting in a place a system of review that will lead to the targets being ratcheted up until they are tight enough to limit warming to 2 degrees. That is this week’s jackpot, but there will be no individual winner – nor any wide-ranging legally-binding agreement. This is a prize for all, or for none.
The danger of the UN-backed annual negotiations is that they can make tackling climate change look like a problem for other people. It is true that it requires global coordination. But that has to grow from national and local interest. It is here that non-state players, among them religions, have a crucial role in helping us to understand that self-interest demands solidarity.
There is a dangerous tendency that has long been plain in Australia and the US and is becoming explicit now in Britain, to present climate change as a story of loss and sacrifice rather than one of potential gain. The decisions the Conservative government at Westminster has taken since winning the election in May have underscored the idea that cutting carbon emissions is a costly vanity rather than an industrial opportunity. George Osborne reinforced that message in last week’s autumn statement, which it emerged soon afterwards included the withdrawal of all support for carbon capture and storage, essential if fossil fuels like shale gas are to be used safely. (No wonder that according to the weekend Financial Times, businesses like Ikea and Tesco have co-written an angry letter protesting at the damaging confusion in the government’s energy policy.)
Yet to say each of us has a contribution to make is not to underestimate the importance of what happens in the next two weeks. Now is the time to lay the cornerstone for a global strategy to cut and ultimately end carbon emissions. On what happens in a series of temporary structures in the suburbs of one of the world’s oldest and greatest cities depend the hopes for a sustainable future for the planet.