Damien Morris's blog

This Sunday, January 31st, represents the official deadline for signatories to the Copenhagen Accord to submit their 2020 emissions targets. While UN officials have taken pains to stress this is a “soft” deadline, it is still an important milestone as countries make their first tentative steps on the global climate policy stage since COP15.

In this context it is paramount that Europe submit an unconditional target of 30% or higher to reinvigorate and normalize ambitious target setting internationally.

The Copenhagen Accord has shifted the emphasis, at least for now, on to unilateral target-setting, with states and regions carefully eyeing the submissions of the others to assess how far they dare go themselves. In light of this, real leadership consists in submitting ambitious domestic targets, which demonstrate a willingness to take significant action in the short to medium term.

At Copenhagen, Europe started to lose its voice – its authority as a leader on climate change waning after too long resting on laurels it earned years ago.

Looking back, the majority of its cuts since 1990 were delivered serendipitously by extraneous policies and events, eased considerably by hot air inherited from EU accession countries and arising from the recession. Looking forward, the distance Europe proposes to travel between now and 2020 looks meagre compared with the steeper emissions trajectories of countries like Japan or the US.

In short, Europe’s “double target” for 2020 of 20%/30% is obsolete. Since 2008 when this was set out, both developed and developing countries have tabled new targets and, more tellingly, the recession has made the 30% cut some £100 billion cheaper to achieve than we’d expected a 20% target to be.

Europe’s murmurings at Copenhagen were drowned out by two competing discourses: on one side were the brash, loud voices of the most powerful – the US and China – prolific emitters reluctant to cede any authority to international institutions; on the other side was the still small voice of conscience represented by those states on the front lines of climate change negotiating their very survival as nations – groups like the Alliance of Small Island States and the Vulnerable 11.

If Europe is to reclaim influence in the UN process, it will derive from being a major economy with moral authority. The lukewarm positioning of recent months will need to be replaced with the kind of domestic targets the vulnerable nations entreat and which the science demands. 20% is not that target. As the single greatest historical emitter, 30% is the bare minimum Europe can reasonably proffer to be in line with IPCC recommendations for developed nations collectively (25-40%).

Dangling the carrot of a “conditional” 30% target has not worked. This is hardly surprising given that 20% is essentially business-as-usual for Europe, and that it was never made precisely clear what conditions would trigger the higher target.

Within Europe, a cluster of progressive countries – amongst them the UK, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands – recognize it is time, both morally and strategically, to shift to 30%. There is push back, though, from countries like Italy and Poland, from the Commission and from industrial groups like the Alliance for Competitive European Industry. We need to drown out these regressive voices with the voice of global civil society.

To this end, Sandbag is calling on individuals and organisations to undersign our open letter to European Council President, Herman van Rompuy, and Spanish Prime Minister, José Luis Zapatero, calling for a minimum, unconditional target of 30% as Europe’s submission to Appendix I of the Accord.

Anticipating Sunday’s deadline, we will be submitting a written copy of the letter later this week with the backing of at least 19 NGOs, and several hundred individuals. But Europe is unlikely to move straight away. That is why we intend to continue to mount pressure over coming months as our supporters grow until Europe takes on the figure it must. We hope you’ll join us.

While the world has waited with baited breath for large national emissions trading schemes (ETS) to kick off in the US and Australia, our Eastern neighbours are quietly exploring emissions trading as well.

Japan, of course, has been experimenting with national emissions trading since 2005, but recently emerging economies form East Asia are beginning to make their own forays in this direction as well.

One of the most promising of these is in South Korea. Just a few days after their announcement on Christmas Eve that they intended to cut 2020 emissions by 20% from 2005 levels, the Ministry of Environment announced that, from late 2010, the Korea Exchange will act as a platform for a three-year pilot ETS. This pilot phase will cover some 641 organisations and intends to cut emissions by 1-2% off the national 2005-2007 average. It is, furthermore, being explicitly designed with a view to linking with international carbon markets.

This represents just the latest stride forward for the country which dedicated 81% of its economic stimulus package to environmental spending.

Another trading scheme getting underway at the end of this will be based in China. The centre of this voluntary scheme will be the newly created Tianjin Climate Exchange, and will involve some 30 companies – including Bayer, Motorolla, and several Electric Utilities based near Tianjin city. Voluntary cap and trade has been explicitly endorsed by the Premiere Wen Jiabao, and backed with $150 million from the Chinese treasury.
China’s National Development and Reform Commission has been quick to dampen expectations of trading on a larger scale, though, fearing that this might imply China is capable of taking on national emissions caps.

Still, with assistance from the US EPA, this will be an important development in China’s capacity to effectively inventory domestic emissions.

Taiwan is another one to watch, with the Minister for Taiwan’s EPA, Stephen Shu-hung Shen, announcing plans for a national emissions trading scheme as the culmination of a three step plan to reduce the country’s greenhouse gases. Taiwan has recently enacted a suite of new energy and climate laws to accelerate decarbonisation and green growth and its Greenhouse Gas Reduction Act is set to be the first legislation of its kind for a developing country.

We will watch these emerging schemes with interest, in the hope that – as they develop – they heed the lessons that have been learned from the European scheme. Key lessons as highlighted by our recent briefing paper include:

• Start with the right sectors which aren’t exposed to international competition such as power, heat and transport
• Auction permits to avoid overallocation, to ensure an equitable distribution of pollution rights and to generate government revenues for green investment.
• Set ambitious targets which will ensure the environmental integrity of your scheme and produce a robust carbon price which advances progressive industries. Ignore the scaremongers.
• Retain the powers to intervene in the market to maintain its environmental integrity.
• Set aside permits to account for additional effort from conscientious citizens and make ETS data transparent to them

Above all, it should be remembered that the ultimate purpose an ETS is to affordably deliver reductions in carbon adequate to the climate challenge. The final measure of a trading scheme will be in the quantity of carbon it prevents from entering Earth’s atmosphere.

The second week of the Copenhagen conference brought a new sense of urgency to NGOs at the COP. In this case it wasn’t just environmental urgency they felt, but an urgency to secure places and accomplish key objectives before being squeezed out of the conference by the UN secretariat.

The UNFCCC, which had approved admission for far more delegates than the venue could contain, began to aggressively cap and constrict the number of NGO delegates in the building. On Tue and Wed attendance was reduced to 7,000, clamping down to 300 on Thursday and Friday. As one campaigner put it, “if only they could do this with carbon emissions!”

My primary mission was clear, I needed to secure a concrete photo opportunity with the Mexican Environment Minister before Sandbag was potentially squeezed out of the conference on Wednesday night. I had been in touch with the delegation since Barcelona, and had been dropping in on them from the start of COP15 trying to arrange an appointment with Minister Elvira. We hoped to present him with an official list of the 3,688 athletes and 2,424 signatories who had supported our One Giant Leap campaign for clean power.

At the start of the conference our petitions had been handed to Yvo de Boer as part of more than 11 million signatures gathered across myriad NGOs by the TckTckTck coalition. Mexico, however, stood out as the country with the greatest number of athletes participating on the global jam on September 26th . It is also one of the first emerging economies to break rank and take on aggressive emission targets (30% off 2020 business as usual). Most importantly, though, it is the likely president for next year’s COP, making it a powerful potential ally to the campaign as the global deal evolves beyond Copenhagen.

First, though, I had to secure a pass from our admission sponsors at CAN-Europe. After a week of long days and late nights inside the convention centre, it was refreshing to get a brief glimpse of the old buildings and cobbled streets of downtown Copenhagen where the Vega NGO centre was based. Despite the pass, I was still obliged, on arrival at the Bella Centre, to spend several hours shivering out in the December cold queuing for access. Not a great start.

Access to the centre was very “democratic”. Directors and CEOs of major companies and utilities took their frigid place in line behind teenage activists. Indeed, very senior businessmen whose duties had prevented them from registering and attending in the first week of the negotiations, had the greatest difficulty, some facing up several days of queuing 5 hours or more before gaining access. This it turns out, was to play to my advantage.

Once inside, I made a bee-line for the plenary room where sectoral trading options were being discussed by a Kyoto Protocol contact group. I’d hoped to try and catch delegates as they came out of the officially closed session, but – adopting my most confident swagger – I was waived inside by an inattentive guard. With the session running overtime I was able to briefly corner the chair at the end of the session, none other than the Vice Chair of the Kyoto Protocol working group, Harald Dovland. Inspired by my shameless lobbying, other NGOs swarmed upon the chair as he vacated the plenary hall, and I was soon swatted away with the rest of them.

In the wake of Dovland’s departure a friend, reported how her boss, the Director of the World Coal Institute, had been locked out in the cold for days unable to get access, despite having NGO equivalent of Willy Wonka’s golden ticket – an orange access pass to the plenaries and high level segments. With him unable to make use of it, and partly to mollify me for scaring Dovland away, she gave the golden ticket to me!

Straight from there I ran to the other side of the Bella Centre to attend a side-event where the Mexican delegation was showcasing its environmental programmes and policies. I was in luck! The Minister was part of the panel at the event and, with persistence and pointy elbows, I managed to steal a moment with him to explain our campaign and to request an appointment for a photo opportunity with him. He felt that it should be possible, took my card and said his team would be in touch. Things were looking up!

After a quick catchup with the Sandbag team over a hurried lunch I lurched off to the opening ceremony for the high-level segment to enjoy one of my new golden ticket privileges. This turned out to be a dubious privilege – not because of the speeches – but because security restrictions obliged me to leave my laptop outside for the duration of the ceremony.

It was during this time that I missed an email from the Mexican office notifying me of a short notice opportunity to meet with the Minister. I could have kicked myself!

I hurriedly emailed the office to try and arrange a new appointment, visited their office to beg for a new timeslot, and had a bizarre altercation with a paranoid security guard who accused me of doing terrorist reconnaissance!

It was now very late and I was about to dejectedly head home when I spotted the Mexican press officer. I approached him and explained my predicament. “Ah! But the Minister is free,” he told me. “He should be here any moment now.” It took some last minute scrambling to find my colleagues and our camera, but the day was salvaged.

Minister Elvira was very obliging and described how, earlier in his political career, he had helped arrange the construction of many of the parks and playgrounds in which the Mexican traceurs now trained. He expressed his hoped that to see the Mexican traceurs come out in force again next year at COP16 to help push for a strong deal – we might have to take him up on that!

I asked him on behalf of our supporters to pursue a global deal for clean electricity – preserving the existing text relating to sectoral trading and advancing the power sector as the most eligible for delivering deep emissions cuts – to both developed and emerging economies. With luck, this will be the beginning of an ongoing dialogue with the Mexican delegation as we push towards a legally binding deal in the coming year.

Since the Bali Action Plan was drawn up at the 13th Conference of the Parties (COP13) in 2007 all eyes have looked toward COP15 in Copenhagen as the place where the next major chapter in the global fight against climate change will be written.

But with the last meeting before COP15 just concluded in Barcelona, this, and many other elements of the Bali Action Plan are now deeply in question.

In a formal address to the NGOs in attendance on Wednesday, Yvo De Boer, the Executive Secretary of the Climate Change Convention, announced that in his view it was no longer “physically possible” to reach a legally binding agreement by the end of December, and that such an agreement might not be reached until the end of 2010 in Mexico.

His address echoed comments made by Michael Zammit Cutajar, one of the UNFCCC chairs, in an NGO meeting on Tuesday, and remarks by the Danish Prime minister on Monday that a “political agreement” was the best outcome we could reasonably expect in the time remaining.

This has outraged the NGO community which has almost univocally called for a legally binding successor to the Kyoto Protocol at COP15, and runs counter to the stated desire of every country which is party to the climate change convention.

So what, then, is the source of the delay? For starters, the first working group under the Convention which deals with the Kyoto Protocol is well behind the Bali schedule in agreeing new targets for developed countries in a second commitment period from 2012, with developing countries calling for substantially greater ambition from the developed world.

Another rift has appeared, in the second working group under the Convention, which deals with Long Term Cooperative Action (LCA) across both developed and developing countries. In this context the developed countries have largely united in calling for the Climate Convention and the Kyoto Protocol to be merged into a single legal document and, following on from this, for the two-track negotiating process to be resolved into one. This doesn’t appear so controversial at first glance until we see that they hope for emerging economies to take on legally binding targets, or to escape from such binding commitments themselves.

Sandbag – alongside many other NGOs – supports the recommendations of the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC in calling for cuts of 25-40% from developed countries off their 1990 emissions by 2020. Anything less represents a shirking of their historical responsibilities. Sandbag has been active in pressuring Europe to lead in taking on such a target – our recent briefing paper demonstrates that unanticipated emissions reductions resulting from the recession now mean that Europe can achieve a 10% deeper emissions cut than originally tabled with equivalent effort.

But major emitters from the developing world have historical responsibilities of their own, and developing nations cite the IPCC selectively when they ignore its recommendations they restrict their collective emissions pathways below business-as-usual levels for 2020. The rhetoric that developed nations are trying to “kill” the Kyoto Protocol” is unhelpful here.

Much has changed since the Framework Convention and the Kyoto Protocol were established, and the Protocol, especially, is an imperfect document controlling too small a share of global emissions far too weakly, while remaining vulnerable to the problem of ‘hot air’ when parties like Russia overshoot their mitigation targets owing to exogenous economic circumstances. A streamlined treaty incorporating all major emitters, while respecting the principle of differentiated responsibility would be a major step forward.

Indeed, it is difficult to understand why the G77 nations which contribute least to climate change and are most threatened by it –especially AOSIS and the Small Island Developing States – would so vocally resist this proposal unless outside incentives and disincentives with China were in play.

These, then, are the major holdups delaying a comprehensive and legally binding agreement from being reached in 6 weeks time. While we still hope that a legal agreement can be reached in COP15, we’d rather a superior agreement was reached 6 months or even a year later, so long as holding arrangements for more ambitious Kyoto commitment periods are ensured as De Boer believes they will be.

It remains our view that a carbon budget for the largest emitters in the global electricity sector represents the best vehicle by which to begin achieving the IPCC emissions reductions recommended across both developed and developing nations. Emerging economies would stay safely outside of economy-wide caps, and could expect to reap substantial financial flows from sectoral trading with developed countries. To promote this position, Sandbag launched our suggested legal text for inclusion in a new treaty at Barcelona last week, with help from a group of Barcelona traceurs who staged a special One Giant Leap jam in the forecourt of the Barcelona Convention Centre for the occasion.

Clearly, though, there are many more obstacles to be cleared on the path to an adequate global deal. Increasingly, it appears that path will stretch beyond Copenhagen.

As images and photos start to stream in from One Giant Leap climate jams around the world, the amazing scale of what we’ve accomplished is becoming clear.

Nearly 40 countries took part at final count, with around 130 jams taking place across different cities worldwide. We’re yet to tally the full list of traceurs who took part on the day, but at well over 3,000 participants it is set to dwarf any parkour jam conducted before and should place us firmly in the record books.

What a fantastic achievement for the global parkour community and what incredible outreach for our climate change campaign!

Environmental campaigns have often been accused of just engaging with the usual suspects, fuelling the guilt of the worried-well in the developed world. That’s certainly not the case here!

This campaign has created an entirely new class of activist, consisting largely of young people in advanced developing countries like Brazil, Russia, India, China and Mexico.

Instead of remonstration they use inspiration. Instead of words they use actions.

Parkour is a discipline of hope – it makes onlookers believe things are possible which they previously felt were beyond reach. It is also a functional discipline which seeks maximum efficiency of action. These are two qualities we hoped to capture in our One Giant Leap campaign:

Firstly, it’s a campaign guided by a vision of a world where clean, low-carbon power is available to all.

Secondly, it's a campaign defined by practical and efficient action to achieve this vision: reducing carbon from the biggest emitting countries in the biggest emitting sector.

It has been wonderful to hear global groups reporting their excitement at being part of something so big and so positive, and that same excitement was certainly tangible at our home event here in London where over a hundred traceurs turned up in support.

Over the coming weeks we will be putting a short campaign film together from the assembled footage in order to capture the energy of the day and use it to galvanize the public and policymakers between now and December. You can help us by encouraging everyone you can to sign our petition at sandbag.org.uk/onegiantleap.

Last week the Sandbag team ventured over to Bonn Germany to attend the most recent UN climate change negotiations leading up to Copenhagen and to drum up some attention for our power sector campaign.

This was my first taste of one of these events, and I was amazed at the hurricane of activity which surrounded the place. The sprawling Maritim hotel complex was crawling with national delegates, pressure groups, businesspeople and media.

Every inch of carpet was covered with people typing furiously at their laptops, and we were no exception – when we weren’t cornering delegates in the corridors, we were busy crunching data for the Climate Action Network or busily preparing for our own side event.

This frenzy of activity from the NGO observers made a distressing contrast with the inertia of the negotiations themselves which in some parts seemed to stall completely. Meeting with the big environment and development NGOs from the UK, there was a deep, collective frustration at the lack of progress or ambition demonstrated. This was hardly surprising after we’d witnessed Japan came up with some bewilderingly weak 2020 commitments and we’d heard a senior member of the UK delegation tell us that a 40% domestic cut for 2020 would be impossible.

On a more positive note, while it is yet to have the public face it needs, it was encouraging to see many of the big NGOs coming together to present a joint position for a Copenhagen Climate Treaty. This kind of solidarity will surely help concentrate pressure on governments and help gather public support around specific Copenhagen outcomes. I can only hope this is the beginning of something bigger. No mention of power sector budgets in there as yet, but we will keep on advocating the need for dedicated policy on this essential sector!

But if this ideas is yet to gain traction with the big NGOs, consultancies like Ecofys, industry groups like the Global Wind Energy Council, and even the International Energy Agency are warming up to it in a big way. Many side events extensively discussed the merits of sectoral crediting mechanisms and sectoral trading, and the power sector was regularly singled out as being particularly eligible for these approaches.

Our own side event sought to showcase the formidable potential of the power sector for driving CO2 mitigation, but we thought we’d demonstrate this unconventionally, using an online game (which you can now play as a single player version). After logging on to the game, attendees were asked to pick from a range of 15 countries. To “win” the game, they had to collectively reduce their power sector emissions enough to peak global CO2 from all energy sectors by 2020. This is a difficult task, and we were very pleased to see the delegates succeed in reaching a sufficient global agreement to peak emissions. More pleasing still was the enthusiastic responses the game generated.

While it was an exhausting week, and the real progress of the negotiations was questionable, it was nonetheless inspiring to meet so many intelligent and passionate people from many different backgrounds united in a common purpose – campaigners, academics, ethical business, youth activists, even a few impressive government delegates.

Perhaps the most amusing piece of gossip we heard was that the drudgery of the negotiating process had driven even quite adversarial negotiators into befriending each other on social networking sites. One Facebook application proving particularly popular – “Which muppet are you?” So there you have it, our collective futures are safely in the hands of a bunch of muppets!

European energy giants EDF and E.ON gave evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee this week on “the role of carbon markets in preventing dangerous climate change”.

Watching from the public gallery, it was gratifying to see members of the cross-parliamentary committee citing Sandbag proposals in their questions. We gave evidence just a few weeks ago, and it seems Committee members have already taken some of our suggestions on board.

Both companies welcomed our proposals to tighten carbon caps under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, but argued complementary mechanisms needed to be rapidly introduced in order to promote investment in low carbon technologies right now.

With EDF being a nuclear company, it was unsurprising to hear them promoting a tough Emissions Performance Standard, which would make nuclear competitive by preventing all but the lowest carbon-intensity power stations from being built. E.ON, which has a major stake in coal, explicitly opposed this, proposing a UK carbon tax fixed to, and amplifying, the EU ETS carbon price.

EDF argued that clear policy guidance was necessary within a year, as the UK power sector urgently needs to replace some 25 Gigawatts of capacity (around a third of current capacity) before 2020. This is not strictly true: considerable new gas plant has already been approved which will take up much of the gap, and the freshly announced Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) demonstration plants together with new offshore wind will help out further. Again, given their energy portfolios, it’s not surprising that both companies are resisting a “dash for gas” which will advantage competitors like Centrica.

Still, both companies are right to point out that current market signals, which strongly favour gas, might fail to achieve the UK’s longer term carbon objectives. While a “dash for gas” would considerably lower the carbon emissions of the sector very rapidly, without policies in place to ensure new gas plant is designed for a CCS retrofit, we would be stuck with high emissions from these power stations until they come offline around 2050.

In relation to Copenhagen they were specifically asked whether they supported a global power sector emissions cap – our main campaign ask. Though they did not express strong views, they acknowledged it was an option being formally considered in the talks leading up to the event.

Overall, it was very encouraging to see representatives of the power sector recognising that the EU ETS needs to be tightened whilst supporting policies complementary with it. The power sector is the only sector with a challenging target and it must be frustrating for them that the lack of ambition elsewhere in the scheme is undermining the price signal. If they can be persuaded to join calls for a significant tightening of the cap and the removal of industrial hot air, it would greatly increase the chances of politicians taking action.

In the build up to the release of the 2009 budget on Wednesday there is much discussion anticipating the environmental measures the budget might or should contain. Most prominent have been the calls for a greater proportion of the UK’s stimulus package to be dedicated to green investment.

Sandbag support calls for larger and smarter green expenditure in the upcoming budget, and still hope that some of the measures we suggested in response to the 2008 budget are introduced. The chief goal must be to usher in a transformed, low carbon economy. There is now broad agreement in the climate change community that the essential vehicle for delivering this is a robust and reliable carbon price.

Unfortunately, the world’s most advanced carbon market – the EU Emissions Trading Scheme – has suffered a beating of late. An over-allocation of permits for the current phase (Phase II) combined with the effects of the recession has served to seriously undermine the price of carbon. European emissions fell some 5% in 2008 and are expected to fall further this year as the recession continues. As a result, according to Barclays Capital, the Phase II carbon market contains some 23 Megatonnes of superfluous carbon dioxide permits (sufficient permits to cover a new Kingsnorth power station for nearly three years). With so much “hot air” in the system, all that is keeping the European carbon price from crashing completely is the fact that companies can carry over their existing permits into Phase III of the scheme, which runs from 2013-2020.

There is a real danger, then, with ETS caps now covering half the UK economy, that investing public money in green jobs and infrastructure might fail to deliver any of the carbon reductions it promises. If investments are not supported through a tightening of caps, a recovery package which affects ETS compliant industries is likely to drive emissions even further below the existing cap, generating more spare permits for sale to other would-be polluters in the scheme. This undermines any environmental “additionality” and potentially drives the carbon price down further still.

So how can we best synchronize the ETS with a green stimulus package in the short to medium term? As Professor Michael Grubb recently commented, “The defining feature of the carbon market – that governments set the quantity – is the key to its salvation.”

Grubb recommends that countries like the UK and Germany, which have held aside some of their Phase II permits for auction across the 2008-2012 period, set a minimum reserve price on their remaining permits. If companies refuse to purchase these, these permits simply won’t enter the market, thereby tightening the Phase II cap. It’s a clever and elegant solution that simultaneously removes “flab” from the market while introducing an unobtrusive price floor. Furthermore, echoing the logic of a corporate share buy-back, government revenues from auction should not be grossly diminished, as the reduced number of permits sold at the reserve price will be offset by their increased value.

In addition to Grubb’s suggestion, Sandbag  supports the introduction of tax incentives that encourage companies with large permit surpluses to voluntarily cancel them as an act of corporate social responsibility, rather than selling them on or banking them into future phases. Taking permits out of circulation in this way would be especially appropriate to companies whose surplus permits were originally “grandfathered”, i.e. bestowed to them for free by government.

Individuals, too, could be encouraged to cancel permits in the carbon market, either through offering them analogous tax rebates when they use specialist cancellation agents like Sandbag, or by subsidising their permit cancellations through Gift Aid.

Beyond setting a reserve price and introducing tax incentives to retire permits from circulation, we also propose a third measure. In order to protect Phase III of the ETS from the “hot air” resulting from the recession in Phase II, we recommend future caps are adjusted downwards. This could be achieved by setting the emissions baseline from actual emissions in 2008-2009 rather than, as is currently proposed, from the emissions allocation for 2010. The ETS carbon budget for Phase II was based around economic projections and political expediency, not climate science. It is only appropriate that future allocations be revised downwards in the light of the economic realities.

When it comes to evaluating Wednesday’s budget, many commentators will be seeking to assess whether Government interventions to bolster the economy are legitimate, well targeted and effective. The CBI, a long standing protector of the market and critic of unnecessary Government intervention is calling for more action to address the market failure of climate change.  The political stage is therefore set for a Government-led revolution in the energy market.  If the Government is serious about securing investment to achieve this, it must aggressively pursue mechanisms to tighten the EU carbon cap, raise the price of carbon and protect the market from crashes.

Damien Morris joins the Sandbag team next week as a campaigner -  by way of introduction he explains here why he didn't take part in the G20 protests this week:

Why I boycotted this week’s climate camp

Like many environmentalist friends, I had intended to lend my support to yesterday’s G20 rally by attending the Climate Camp. Many of them were encouraged by their employers: several environmental organisations across London granted staff the afternoon off to join the rally. Like their staff, they had the best of intentions – any opportunity to proclaim the importance of rapid global action on climate change should be seized.

Before heading down, however, I had a quick trawl of the internet to see what was happening on the ground, what speakers were expected and, most importantly, what key messages were being made. On the last I was most dismayed.

The slogan of yesterday’s Climate Camp was “Stopping Carbon Markets”, and its dedicated web-page calls for an end to the “foolishness” of “brain-bending” carbon permits. A hyperlink takes readers from there to a lengthy tirade on the evils of carbon trading. I took my bag off my shoulder and settled in for an afternoon at the office.

While I’m absolutely certain positions very different to the official Climate Camp line were widely represented at the rally, I could not, in good faith, swell the numbers of a protest which explicitly sought to undermine the one route to climate change mitigation which I feel has any chance of success.
The Camp website decries the prospect of climate change being “left to the market” but they fail to understand that carbon markets were explicitly created to correct what Stern rightly called “the greatest market failure that the world has seen”.

Carbon now has a price, paid for by polluters themselves rather than being an “externality” whose costs are shouldered by everyone. This price is dictated by scarcity of permits within a cap, a cap which can be tightened as we get a clearer sense of what the carbon reductions required to avoid dangerous climate change. Yes, carbon markets are “brain-bending”, and yes they are currently flawed, but that should not prevent us from recognizing them as our best hope for achieving the emissions reductions we so desperately need. We need realistic responses which see the bigger picture.

While the Climate Camp website rightly promotes personal and community-scale efforts to mitigate carbon, they fail to propose any mechanism to curtail emissions from global industry, emissions which would totally overwhelm and negate the small-scale achievements they endorse. Sandbag campaigns for carbon markets to be strengthened through tighter permit allocations in keeping with the latest science. We also hope to see carbon markets spread to better account for emissions from around the globe, be it through the emergence of compatible trading schemes in the U.S.A. and Australia, or through the introduction of a parallel scheme covering the power sector world-wide. Lastly, we’d like to see existing markets amended to better reflect the humble efforts made my committed individuals to reduce their climate impacts.

While I admire the Climate Camp organisers for once again mobilising impressive civic action on climate change, I will have to refrain from marching beside them until the day comes when we rally behind a different, more solution-focused slogan. We need to focus on improving and augmenting the international systems already in place – they were hard won. With Copenhagen looming in December, I hope that day comes soon.