Will the reconstruction of the global economy be positive for mitigating climate change? Is the move toward energy security at odds with a low-carbon society? Do we need the return of state planning to overcome the climate change challenge? How can the response to climate change be socially just? How can we forge an achievable but also equitable and legally secure international emissions deal at Copenhagen?

By addressing these questions, leading international thinkers and practitioners put forward a compelling new account of climate change politics and policies in this pamphlet, demonstrating how a low-carbon future can be built by a revitalised co-existence of markets and the state, as well as a strong political narrative of hope and opportunity.

   Download ”Building a low carbon future: the politics of climate change“.

 Edited by Anthony Giddens, Simon Latham, and Roger Liddle

 Outline

1. The politics of climate change: our role in the debate (Policy Network)

Section I: the dilemmas of domestic policy in advanced economies

2. Will the reconstruction of the global economy be positive for mitigating climate change? (Terry Barker)

3. Is the move toward energy security at odds with a low-carbon society? (Jim Watson)

4. Do we need the return of state planning to overcome the climate change challenge? (Felix Christian Matthes)

5. How can we build political support for action on climate change in western democracies? (Hugh Compston and Ian Bailey)

6. How can the response to climate change be socially just? (Roger Liddle and Simon Latham)

Section II: building an international framework for action

7. How can commitments on greenhouse gas emissions reductions be entrenched in the international legal system? (Stephen Hockman QC)

8. What should an international agreement on climate change at Copenhagen look like? (Mutsuyoshi Nishimura)

Section III: the United Kingdom: the poltics of low-carbon transition

9. Climate change: the political and business challenge (Peter Mandelson)

10. The UK’s carbon targets for 2020 and the role of the Committee on Climate Change (Sam Fankhauser, David Kennedy and Jim Skea)

11. Can the UK reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050? (Neil Carter)

About the contributors

Ian Bailey is senior lecturer in human geography at the University of Plymouth. He is the author of Turning Down the Heat: The Politics of Climate Policy in Affluent Democracies (2008, edited with Hugh Compston).

Terry Barker is director of the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research, University of Cambridge. He is also the leader of the research programme “Integrated Modelling” at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and chairman of Cambridge Econometrics.

Neil Carter is professor of politics and a founding member of the Centre for Ecology, Law and Policy at the University of York. He is the author of The Politics of the Environment:Ideas, Activism, Policy (2007).

Hugh Compston is a reader in politics at the University of Cardiff. His publications include Policy Networks and Policy Change (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2009) and Turning Down the Heat: The Politics of Climate Policy in Affluent Democracies (2008, edited with Ian Bailey).

Samuel Fankhauser is a principal research fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. He is also a member of the UK Committee on Climate Change.

Anthony Giddens is a former director of the London School of Economics and Political Science and a member of the House of Lords. His most recent publication is The Politics of Climate Change (2009).

Stephen Hockman QC is a trustee of ClientEarth and an environmental law specialist. He is a former chairman of the Bar Council.

David Kennedy is the chief executive of the UK Committee on Climate Change. Previously he worked on energy strategy at the World Bank and the design of infrastructure investment projects at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Simon Latham is a policy researcher at Policy Network, where he is coordinating research programmes on “The politics of climate change” and “An EU “fit for purpose in the global age”.

Roger Liddle is vice-chair of Policy Network and a visiting fellow at the LSE’s European Institute. He is former economic adviser to the European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso and former European adviser to Tony Blair. His most recent publication is Beyond New Labour (2009, with Patrick Diamond).

Peter Mandelson is the UK Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.

Felix Christian Matthes is research coordinator of Energy and Climate policy at the Öko-Institut/Institute for Applied Ecology in Berlin.

Mutsuyoshi Nishimura is special adviser on climate change to the prime minister and cabinet of Japan, and a former Japanese ambassador for the Kyoto Protocol.

Jim Skea is research director at UK Energy Research Centre and a member of the UK Committee on Climate Change. Previously, he has been the director of the Policy Studies Institute and a director of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Global Environmental Change Programme.

Jim Watson is director of the Sussex Energy Group and deputy leader of the Tyndall Centre Climate and Energy Programme at the University of Sussex.

Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society and Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics  at the University of Cambridge speaks to Policy Network ahead of his speech on the politics of climate change. He asserts that faith in technology will see us meet 2050 targets, live in a low-carbon society,  and maintain our standard of living and levels of economic growth.

Congratulations to the organisers for an unusually well constructed day on an unusually complex issue. What was its conclusion?

The key one got said at the conference – the brutal truth is we are missing the key targets – but it remained in the small print of the main debate. 20 years of serious scientific understanding and three years of intensive public awareness later, there is no decline in the trend of emissions outputs nor even a declaration.

Given the propulsion of population numbers and consumption appetite it is very difficult to have confidence that the upward trend is going to be reversed. As a measure of the problem, during the day of the conference itself, 100m tonnes of CO2 was added to the great stock pile in the sky, net of whatever declining proportion the oceans and forests are able to reabsorb. It is as if we continue to picnic by a stream with a wall of water mounting out of sight and out of mind round the corner.

 It appeared that there was a very common agreement and understanding of this problem at the conference, although all were broadly positive about its manageability. A clear signal on carbon price and political recognition that energy was going to be more expensive in the future were important preconditions. It was also implicitly agreed by all the speakers that nothing can effectively happen until each business sector has the necessary economic, regulatory, motivational, funded framework agreed and supported by government to change the existing business models. The practical question is how can these frameworks be put in place speedily and faster than the science worsens.

 To get the right urgency we need science to scream out yet more loudly than it is that political and business approaches are not evolving at the same speed as the problem measured in the only way that matters, emissions outputs now and at clearly identified breakpoints in the near medium future. We also need to describe the situation as it really is which is not a dream but a nightmare of complexity, risk, vested (but not necessarily bad) interests and dreadful uncertainty. We need the second half of Martin Luther King’s philosophy that asserts “we will overcome” which was not at all obvious when it was said.

David Cote’s six constraints and seven propositions on efficiency get to the nub of sector by sector action needed to get all entrepreneurs to pluck the low lying fruit. How best to make that happen?

Tony Blair instinctively put his finger on leadership as the answer. Is this where the Policy Network can make the next and perhaps most important contribution?

Inevitably this first conference could only put the issue on the table. My suggestion would be we need a second, urgently focused entirely on constraints and priority actions for each major stream of energy and industrial activity, working in smaller groups with report back mechanisms to the full body. I am sure there would be widespread support. If the findings of such a conference were then taken up by the Corporate leaders Group and the CBI and supported by Government we might then have a real practical launch pad for incentivised action.

Leslie Dighton is founder and director of The Chairmans Club in London; founder and chairman of Corporate Renewal Associates; author of papers on value creation, global governance, board leadership, corporate pitfalls and organisational resilience; governor of the London School of Economics; advisory member of the National Consumers Council; and member of the Global Business Network.

Roger Liddle, Vice Chair of Policy Network gives his concluding thoughts on the Policy Network’s conference on ‘The Politics of Climate Change’ on 5th June 2009 at the LSE.

Part 2

Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Tony Blair headlines the afternoon plenary at Policy Network’s ‘Politics of Climate Change’ conference on 5th June at the LSE.

David Cote, CEO of Honeywell, speaks to Policy Network ahead of his speech in the second plenary.

In his speech Cote discussed climate change-related business trends and Honeywell’s growing role in the European and U.S. energy efficiency markets.

“While adoption and the individual savings contribution of these technologies will differ by region, the overall forecasted energy savings is 15-20% for both the U.S. and Europe,” said Cote.

Cote discussed the impediments and solutions to using energy efficient technologies, including a call for governments worldwide to uncover more ways to curb energy consumption while creating incentives that support energy and economic security.

“Reducing energy intensity while improving energy and economic security is a huge issue,” said Cote. “We won’t get there unless we address the behaviors inherent in the system. It is all very doable, we just have to get started.”

Watch his speech in full here.

Terry Leahy, the CEO of Tesco speaks about incentivizing the consumer to live a low carbon way of life at Policy Network’s ‘Politics of Climate Change’ conference on 5th June 2009 at the LSE. Leahy argues a green way of life begins and ends with the consumer and they must be motivated not just through tax and regulation to change their lifestyle. He believes governments cannot see consumers as a problem by restricting and rationing our lives, rather create frameworks and markets that encourages both businesses and consumers towards a better way of life.

Terry Leahy’s speech on the politics of climate change:

“As we prepare for Copenhagen later this year, we need to confront a brutal truth: our approach to tackling climate change is not working. On current trends, we’re going to miss all the targets we have set ourselves. We’re in this situation because the climate change debate is based on a number of wrong assumptions. One is that climate change can only be solved by big governments and big technology.

I am not implying that government has no role at all – of course it does. Transport, planning, energy: these are just some areas where government has a key role to play in taking a lead and creating a framework for action. Nor am I downplaying the importance of technology, which will make a huge contribution. But we cannot be sure that technology alone will rescue us from climate change. Those technologies that can help us and are developed – such as nuclear power – rely not only on science and economics, but on the public’s attitude.

Which brings me to people. When this debate focuses on people, too often they are seen as part of the problem. We blame people for consuming and wasting too much, and flying and driving too often. Policy thinking on choice editing, taxation or personal carbon allowances is designed more to stop people doing things, rather than encouraging them to start doing things. If we want to turn people off the green agenda, the best way is to say we’re going to tax and regulate them to reduce their consumption.

Taxes, targets, regulations – this is the classical approach of central planners. We don’t seem to remember the lessons that planned economies taught us. Economies where the state decrees production and consumption – how much we can have, how much we can do, what is allowed and what isn’t – lead to stagnation, disillusion, chaos and collapse.

One lesson we learnt from planned economies is that going against the grain of people’s instincts and desires is inefficient and in the end unsustainable. This applies to cutting carbon too. In Ireland a carrier bag tax of 15 Euro cents per bag was introduced in 2002. It reduced carrier bag usage significantly, but by 2006 single-use carrier bag usage was increasing again. So the tax was increased to 22 Euro cents. In Tesco in the UK, we have achieved a 50 per cent and rising reduction in carrier bag usage not through a tax but by a simple incentive – one Clubcard point – worth about a penny – awarded for re-using a bag. Reward behaviour and you will find the economic cost is a fraction of the cost of penalising behaviour – and in the end will be better sustained because it goes with the grain of people’s lives.

A second lesson that planned economies taught us is that regulation and prohibition cannot begin to match the power of human initiative. The scale of emissions reductions we need to achieve – not just in advanced economies but across the world – is many times what can be achieved by this top-down approach.

I believe that climate change will only be tackled successfully by getting the best out of people, not by controlling or limiting what they can do. Every major challenge in the modern world – technological, medical or social – has been achieved by growing, successful market economies: by encouraging and helping people to do new things rather than by stopping people from doing things. My principle here is that you can be green and grow. Choosing between green and growth is absurd – especially at the moment, where the choice would be between low growth and no growth. Even if we for a moment think we can make that choice, do we really believe that China or India will embrace any policies that inhibit their growth?

Green growth requires a leap in technology to propel us from a high-carbon economy to a low-carbon economy. But that won’t be enough to cut carbon on the scale required. We need consumers, through their purchasing and their behaviour, to embrace these technologies, and the products and services that flow from them.

This is not a pipe dream. All our research shows that consumers want to go green – but they need help in making the change. If going green is just about taking things away from consumers, it is not going to work. But if you say to someone ‘here is a better life, a low carbon life’, you will get green consumption and green growth. As Arnold Schwarzenegger has said, you have got to make it cool to be green.

So we must inform, empower and encourage consumers to move to a low-carbon lifestyle. By building demand for low-carbon consumption, consumers will stimulate competition between businesses to produce greener alternatives than current products and services. They will also encourage businesses to lower their own carbon footprints, as consumers reward businesses that are green.

Think about it. When you are at the checkout, each “bleep” of the barcode sends a signal down the supply chain. Produce more of that product, or in the case of a product you have not chosen: “change what you produce”. Give consumers more information about products’ carbon footprints, and they will buy greener products. And when then happens, the supply chain will turn green.

So empowered and motivated consumers can be the key to a revolution in green consumption and the technological revolution that must underpin it. Get this right and consumers can have an influence way beyond the 60 per cent or so accounted for by their direct and indirect emissions.

At Tesco we’re putting this thinking into practice. First, we’re helping consumers make green choices – by giving them more information about products’ carbon footprints, for example. We’ve learnt a great deal about how we can reduce emissions and costs and about how we can influence customer behaviour. We have put carbon labels on over 100 products and today we are announcing that we’re now going to label our plastic bags, milk, bread, paper and home insulation service.

Secondly, we’re cutting emissions ourselves. Our targets for green growth are as tough as any set by the UK government. One is to ensure that on average all new stores we build emit half the carbon that an equivalent store emitted in 2006. Today I can announce that this year we will build in Ramsey, Cambridgeshire, a zero-carbon store – working with the Manchester Sustainable Consumption Institute to create a store that will not have a carbon impact in the way it is run.

Thirdly, in tackling climate change, collaboration is vital. Business, government and consumers are inter-dependent. Electric cars are an example: Manufacturers must improve the technology and governments must incentivise it if consumers are to embrace it. We too can play our part. So we’re going to begin by making a commitment to trial electric car charging points in some of our London stores.

This strategy is locked into the core of our business. Our aim is not simply to “green” Tesco, but to spark the creation of something much bigger – a mass movement in green consumption.

Which brings me back to my core point: consumers are agents of change. Trust them and we can begin to make real progress in the fight against climate change. To do that, we need a fresh approach, based on a simple belief: consumers are a force for good. Thank you for listening”.

Speech  delivered by Business Secretary Lord Mandelson at the Policy Network event: ‘The Politics of Climate Change: Overcoming the political challenges of climate change – from economic crisis to business revolution’ London School of Economics, Friday 5th June, 2009

I think we’re entering a precarious time for mainstream politics in the UK. Cynicism and scepticism about politicians and politics in the UK is obviously pretty high. We badly need a core of positive ideas about the future in this country and for me climate change is at the heart of that.

Rebuilding political trust in Britain matters for its own sake. But it also matters because politics is the only way that we will be able to legitimately make the huge decisions that need to be made now to face up to challenges like climate change, or our global economic future. Politics is the mulitplier for the sense of collective renewal and endeavour. This morning I would like to say just a few things about how we do that, particularly in industrial policy.

The core challenge of climate change politics is getting people to connect their choices now with outcomes in the relatively distant future and in different parts of the world. It’s going to cost in the short term, there is no way around that.

People often find the scale of the challenge overwhelming. So somehow we have to go from awareness to engagement, rather than awareness to resignation.

The only way to do this is to stress that at the levels of individual choices, business choices and national economic choices, the shift to low carbon offers economic opportunities as well as costs.

In energy savings or trade, the global market for low carbon goods and services is already worth around £3trillion a year, and will probably grow by half that again by 2015.

Almost 900,000 people already work in the sector or its supply chain in the UK, not just in green manufacturing but in green services like consultancy or low carbon venture capital. The sector is projected to maintain positive growth rates, even through the downturn. We are in a strong position to be a global first mover.

But how do we shape a positive business environment for low carbon goods and services in the UK? How do we ensure that UK companies have the necessary skilled workforces, clarity and certainty to invest in change?

The government has already set out some of the answers to these questions in its New Industry, New Jobs paper and its ultra low carbon vehicles strategy and will provide a full picture in its Low Carbon Industrial Strategy in the summer. At the heart of this work are three basic ideas.

The first is the need for a long term strategic approach from government. Businesses won’t invest in change and individuals won’t invest in training for low carbon industries or make low carbon consumer choices unless they believe that the direction of travel in our society is irreversibly towards a low carbon future.

Up until recently there has been too much ambiguity or uncertainty in UK climate policy – in nuclear energy or renewables for example. Clear leadership on these questions over the course of the last year has now unlocked billions of pounds of investment in UK capacity. We need to get that sense of clear strategic direction right through our action as a government.

The second basic principle is that market dynamics alone will not create the shift we need quickly or effectively enough. We cannot be ideological about the joint roles of the market and the state in driving this transition.

At the most fundamental level this can mean intervening in the market to raise the cost of carbon in certain ways, and to a level that forces a genuine change in behaviour.

It is also going to mean public sector interventions to ensure that Britain has the necessary infrastructure to support low carbon technologies. That can mean the grid, which is up for serious renewal over the next five years.

It can mean other forms of infrastructure such as the charging networks required to make ultra-low carbon vehicles viable. While these technologies and consumer preferences are still clearly barely off the drawing board, we do need to be careful to ensure that lack of infrastructure does not create a vicious cycle that undermines viable technological solutions.

We’ll need to ensure that UK-based companies can draw on a quality science base and the resources to develop and commercialise low carbon technologies.

In the budget, we created a £750million fund that will be used to strengthen the Technology Strategy Board and which we will use to make selective investments in, among other things, the resources our companies can use to test and commercialise low carbon technologies.

Our skills policy will be adapted in the summer to reflect the growing need for workers with low carbon skills.

We are also looking at ideas for a new public-private innovation fund that would be a source of growth capital for high tech SMEs many of which would inevitably be in the low carbon sector.

Where appropriate, it will also mean government intervening in the market to generate demand – with support for buyers of energy efficiency measures or ultra low carbon vehicles, or government procurement programs that increase demand for ultra-low carbon vehicle fleets.

Finally, I believe government has a responsibility to ensure that UK-based companies are equipped to compete for the new demand created by government climate change policies. This kind of strategic approach was set out in the government’s New Industry, New Jobs paper in April – no doubt you’ve all read it.

Peter Mandelson Video Part 2

Green politics sometimes presents business as the enemy of climate policy. For as long as business resists long term change then that will be the case. But low carbon business, and ‘low carbon consumers’ can also be a major positive driver of change.

Mainstream climate change politics obviously can’t be totally anti-politics, anti-business and anti-growth. We can’t just throw green slime at the problem. It will however mean a different approach to politics, business and growth. Mainstream green politics needs to inherit the passion and urgency of green politics, if not all of the inflexibility.

And it has to be positive, it has to be about opportunities. Of course business models are going to have to change and there will be costs. But negative incentives for change can only be half the story.

So three basic principles for a positive environment for low carbon business: a long term strategic approach from government; a pragmatic approach to the role of both markets and the state, and a recognition that we should be actively equipping our people to supply the demand created by climate change targets.

This is all the more important in the context of the current recession, where investment in the transition to low carbon has the potential to play an important part in our economic recovery and renewal.

I started by saying we are at a precarious time for mainstream politics in the UK. We can get cynical about politics in this country, or we can have a serious debate about what needs to be done to get our politics back on track and our economy back to growth.

A positive politics of climate change depends on us deciding that politics works, that it is how we focus collectively on a different future, and in focusing on it, make it happen.

ENDS

Matthias Machnig, State Secretary of the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nuclear Safety and Nature Conservation, talks to Policy Network.

Greg Clark, UK Shadow Secretary of State for Energy & Climate Change, talks to Policy Network about the politics of climate change. He was talking at the conference organised by Policy Network at the London School of Economics, on the 5th of June 2009.