Cutting by 40%… but these campaigners wanted to cut emissions, not spending

I’m at the Labour party conference in Manchester this week, doing the rounds of the climate fringe events and asking whether ‘Red Ed’ will rediscover his previous persona as ‘Green Ed’. Expect a number of posts reporting back over the next few days.

First up, the future of the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) itself. This emerged as a key concern at this morning’s Fabians discussion on green jobs, with speakers Emily Thornberry MP (Shadow Energy & Climate team), Michael Jacobs (former environment advisor to Gordon Brown),  Alan Whitehead MP, and Tony Hawkhead (CEO of environmental charity Groundwork).

The panel expressed great disquiet about the impact of the looming spending cuts on DECC. The department’s current budget is some £3.2bn; cutting its spend by 40% – as the Treasury asked all departments to model earlier this year – would leave it with just £1.92bn to spearhead the low-carbon transition. But it was pointed out that £1.7bn of DECC’s existing budget is spent on nuclear clean-up: liabilities that have to be taken care of and that Government can hardly divest themselves of. Assuming DECC would still be saddled with this responsibility, a 40% budget cut would leave the department with a paltry £220m to support renewables, energy efficiency, low-carbon cars and all the rest. DECC would effectively cease to function as a meaningful department – and it’s understood that DECC officials have said as much to the Treasury.

Opinions varied amongst speakers as to whether this level of cuts were likely. The average cut requested by Treasury across Whitehall is 25% – and whilst some departments may be forced to cut up to 40%, others will escape with shallower wounds. (Although PIRC understands that some departments have offered in excess of even 40% – naming no names, but young Conservative Ministers tend to be more ‘ambitious’ in this regard.)

Even if DECC emerges from the Spending Review with three-quarters of its budget intact, questions remain over how much power it will continue to wield, with a resurgent Treasury extending its mandate across Whitehall. The Guardian reported recently that the Treasury was considering absorbing DECC into its own fold – somewhat overblown rumours, as it turned out; but as the future of climate policy in the UK becomes increasingly bound up in finding sufficient low-carbon finance (notably for the Green Investment Bank), the role of the Treasury will only grow. A member of the audience, who identified himself as a former civil servant, worried that BIS or Treasury would take an increasing control over climate policy, with DECC emasculated just two years since its creation. It would take strong Ministers to resist this trend, said one of the speakers. Today’s Morning Star carries an article on this by former MP Alan Simpson, under the headline, ‘All hands on DECC’ [although they seem to have put up the wrong article at present - 1.30pm]

Looking at the figures, it’s worth highlighting again how much of DECC’s current responsibilities lie in the realm of managing liabilities – both nuclear and fossil. The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, one of the bodies that will survive the Coalition’s ‘bonfire of the quangos’ – as revealed in a Cabinet Office document leaked last week – swallows up £880m on its own. Clearly no-one is arguing we should stop cleaning up nuclear waste. But it does underline how the full price of a nuclear-powered energy system isn’t confined to set-up costs; something that should always be borne in mind when people balk at the high up-front costs of renewables, which do not, however, incur costs for either fuel or waste processing.

Separately, in conversations after the workshop with staff working in local government, it appears that the low-carbon agenda isn’t just under threat from cuts to DECC. The Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) has also staged a full-scale retreat from all things climate since the Coalition government coming to power, with Minister Eric Pickles appearing to pursue a ‘back to basics’ approach and hiving off his low-carbon teams to DECC. Sustainable development used to be understood as something that had to be embedded across government, not just in one department. But that was in the days when we had a Sustainable Development Commission scrutinising all of Whitehall – and now that’s been axed, too.

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On the Guardian’s Comment is Free, the Communities Minister Eric Pickles has made some bold claims about ‘human nature’ in introducing the coalition’s household recycling policy. Under the new policy, householders will be rewarded for recycling with points that can be cashed in at ‘local businesses’ such as Marks and Spencer and Cineworld. Bravely summarising decades of behavioural research in just two sentences, Pickles states that:

“There are some basic truths about human nature that the previous government found hard to grasp. If you want people to do something, then it’s always much more effective to give them support and encouragement – a nudge in the right direction – than to tell them what to do and then punish them if they don’t obey.”

He later goes on to claim:

“What’s really important about this scheme is that it treats people like adults. There’s no compulsion to participate, no penalties for opting out. It works because there’s a clear incentive to get involved. You put something in, you get something back. This is the Big Society in action.”

Unfortunately, the one basic truth about human nature that Pickles overlooks is the one that seems most essential for the Big Society: people respond to what others around them are doing, and don’t just behave in a rational, individually beneficial way. If they did, far less people would play the lottery.

Much more important than any individual-level cost/benefit analysis of whether to recycle is whether a particular behaviour is seen as socially acceptable. In several psychological studies, the power of social norms has been demonstrated for environmental behaviours like recycling and home energy management. In a famous example, American researchers showed that energy-hungry households reduced their energy consumption when they had access to information about the average usage in their area. They saw their high-energy use as socially undesirable, and fell into line.

Nobody wants to be seen as the gas guzzler in a neighbourhood full of waste-watchers, so reward or punishment schemes may be missing the point if they are aimed at individuals rather than tapping into the huge potential of social comparisons to generate behaviour change. People are more likely to compete to out-do each other than they are for a few pounds off their supermarket bill, and another recent psychological study showed how important people think it is to be ‘seen to be green’. Shoppers were willing to pay a premium for products with an environmental advantage – although only if they thought that other people were watching.

But there are also deeper reasons for not creating a direct link between recycling rates and financial rewards. Studies by Tim Kasser have shown that people who are highly materialistic are the least likely to act in a pro-environmental way. Paying people to recycle promotes the very value (material gain) that is likely to inhibit more ambitious changes in behaviour, or support for policies that may in fact cost people money in low-carbon taxes.

In short, Pickles’ Big Society recycling plan has no societal component, promotes the environmentally and socially antagonistic value of individual material gain as a reason for recycling, and amounts to paying people to put out their rubbish. Is that the best the Big Society can do?

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This struck me then as a problem, and data from January’s Mori poll adds weight to this thought, suggesting that there is a real risk in politicians being the main group that’s heard to talk about climate change. But the results also give us some of the most striking results I’ve seen to suggest that the British public are in fact pretty concerned about climate change.

At the end of their questionnaire, Mori asked the respondents their level of agreement with a series of statements, covering perceptions of climate change, personal responsibility, and the role of government. What the responses suggest is that people are worried about climate change, but are highly suspicious of politicians’ motives when they hear them talking about it.

The statements around the importance and impact of climate change indicate that levels of strong scepticism among the public remain relatively low. More than twice as many strongly disagree that climate change is “scaremongering”, and very few accept the argument that climate change is not necessarily bad for the planet.

(That said, the results of the “scaremongering” question do remind us that while the climate sceptics’ arguments are believed by only a minority, they are accepted to some degree by 3 in 10. There remain many who are still unconvinced by the climate science)

Nevertheless, climate change is widely seen to be an extremely bad thing. When asked about the impact of climate change in the UK and globally, comfortable majorities see it as really very unpleasant.

Climate change is believed to be likely both to endanger the whole of like on earth, and not to give the UK better weather and more sunshine. The sometimes-used sceptic argument, that it will actually make the world more liveable (or have no impact), appears to have been roundly rejected.

But when we look at the political results, there’s something far less reassuring for those trying to build public support around tackling climate change. As we’ve seen, governments are felt to have the most responsibility for the issue. But the Mori poll is clear in showing that politicians are also hugely distrusted when they talk about climate change.

So great is this distrust of politicians, that even while there is widespread acceptance that climate change is happening, the government is still believed to be using it as a ruse to raise taxes and distract people from other issues. It’s clear that allowing politicians to be the only voice that is heard promoting action on climate change would be (maybe already is) very counter-productive.

We don’t have an answer here for which sources are more trusted – particularly post-Climategate. But whichever sources are more trusted to make a case for tackling climate change, it’s clear that there’s still a strong level of individual willingness to take action. So one final statement, to end on a positive about support for tackling climate change:

This is a guest post, originally published on ClimateSock​.com

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I was in Copenhagen for the duration of the UN climate talks as part of the UK Youth Delegation (you can see my earlier coverage of the conference on the UKYD blog, here). It was a non-stop, sleep-deprived, and confusing fortnight, with many twists and turns as events unfolded. The first week began with a leaked draft text that appeared to kill off the Kyoto Protocol and penalise developing nations unfairly; to which the G77 bloc of developing nations responded with their own draft text, which was also leaked. Matters escalated with impassioned speeches, walk-outs, and repeated instances of the talks breaking down. As world leaders arrived in their droves and debate reached a crescendo, the possibility of the talks collapsing entirely suddenly became very real – a possibility which only receded with some last-minute interventions.

All of which made for exciting viewing, and some excitable journalism. But it became harder and harder over the two weeks to see what was really going on at the talks; to discern beneath the daily froth the deeper currents of power politics. In particular, the final days of the conference – when the Copenhagen Accord was thrashed out behind closed doors with few NGO observers allowed in – is proving difficult to piece together. Who was truly privy to the writing of the Accord? Who compromised, and on what? Who was responsible for gutting it of its crucial commitments? In short, whodunnit?

It seems that everyone, whether politician seeking exoneration or pundit reaching for explanation, has a different story. President Obama got the chance to shape immediate impressions of the deal through dint of a press conference which circumvented the UN negotiations (meaning that some delegates heard about the Accord through BBC news first, rather than in plenary). Despite this, he did not seem overly keen to spin the deal his way – claiming it to be a “meaningful and historic”, but acknowledging that it would not be enough. The head of the Chinese delegation, Xie Zhenhua, issued a more propagandist statement – “The meeting has had a positive result, everyone should be happy” (which reminded me of Margaret Thatcher’s injunction to journalists asking about the Falklands War: “Simply rejoice!”).

Meanwhile, the Times, somewhat bizarrely, decided to pin the failure of Copenhagen in part on small island states (“Any process that makes a star of the teams from Tuvalu and the Maldives is bound to balk progress”). Western NGOs, on the other hand, had no doubts that the developed nations were the key culprits; Greenpeace International’s website, for example, argued that “the blame for failure mostly lies with the rich industrialised world… in particular, the US failed to take any real leadership and dragged the talks down.” Youth, too, blamed Obama; after all, it was in him whom many young people, myself included, had vested such hopes for a successful treaty at Copenhagen. At a demonstration I attended the night the deal was announced, many young protesters carried pictures of the President with the words ‘Climate Shame’ pinned to them, and chanted anti-Obama slogans.

But as the conference ended and recriminations began to fly, different stories emerged. Upon returning to the UK, Ed Miliband and Gordon Brown both issued surprisingly undiplomatic statements criticizing a small group of outspoken developing countries (identified in private as Sudan, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Cuba) for refusing to sign the Accord, thereby causing the UN to merely ‘note’ it rather than adopt it. More significantly, they blamed China for weakening the provisions in the Accord: removing the crucial emissions targets for the world to cut 50% of its emissions, and industrialised nations 80%, by 2050. At first this seemed to me to be just too convenient. Surely this was just another case of blame-China-syndrome, akin to the frequently-repeated factoid that since China builds two coal plants a week, there’s little use us Brits doing anything.

But then other reports began to corroborate their account of events. John Vidal, usually highly sympathetic in his coverage of developing countries wrote in the Guardian that the Chinese delegation had been instrumental in removing emissions targets from the final Accord (” China doesn’t like numbers”).  Then environmental writer Mark Lynas, who had observed events first-hand as part of the Maldives’ delegation, pointed his finger squarely at China, claiming it had forced the removal of both 2050 emissions targets (a 50% cut for the world, an 80% cut for developed nations). “The truth is this”, he fumed: “China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful ‘deal’ so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame.” Strong words, and still more so coming from a respected climate campaigner. Is Lynas, too, simply reaching for “familiar villains”, as media commentator Tim Holmes has it? Or in the words of David Wearing, author of the Democrat’s Diary, unwittingly “relaying Western spin”?

I went over to ChinaDialogue seeking an alibi for the Chinese Government. But there I found other witnesses only too willing to pin the blame on the People’s Republic. Isabel Hilton, ChinaDialogue’s director, pulls few punches: “China played a heavily obstructive role”. The reporter Cao Haili writes that “China has bought some time” by resisting a stronger deal, even though “the Chinese government knows that eventually they will have to go in that direction.” The project’s development manager, Tan Copsey, argues: “The United States and China, the world’s largest historical contributor to climate change and the world’s largest current emitter, were at the heart of the failure to reach a more substantial agreement.” Meanwhile, Julian Wong, author of the excellent Green Leap Forward blog, reckons that China has done pretty well out of the Copenhagen Accord: “My unofficial final score ends up with China ahead… World 3.5, China 4.5.”

Did China show any flexibility in its stance? Yes: the US wrung an important concession from it on the international monitoring of emissions. This is significant, because as academic John Lee writes,  international teams of inspectors “…would see first hand and report back how China’s 45 million local officials remain the most formidable obstacle to improving transparency in China’s sprawling economic structure… Developed countries suspect that China will receive plaudits and concessions from any future carbon emissions regime without actually keeping its promises.” Also significant was the promise the Chinese government unveiled prior to Copenhagen – that it would cut carbon emissions relative to economic growth by 40% to 45% by 2020 compared with 2005 levels. There has been some debate as to whether this really represents a deviation from business-as-usual, since China has already been improving its energy efficiency by similar magnitudes over the past decade. Regardless of this, the continued compliance of local officials remains crucial in achieving this, and it’s not a given.

It isn’t only Western countries who are castigating China. Ali Yang from Greenpeace China comments that, whilst China generally allies itself with the G77, Copenhagen gave oxygen to the “cry of the most vulnerable developing countries for China to take more responsibility”.

Clearly, Copenhagen has revealed the limits of Beijing’s willingness to act on climate change: the Government doesn’t want to be bound by legal agreements and certainly isn’t prepared to set absolute emissions caps. Jonathan Watts recounts the words of a negotiator from an Asian nation: “China champions the position of the G77… But actually their position is very similar to that of the US. They are both major emitters who are refusing to accept binding consequences.”

For the past decade, the Western climate movement has demonised George W Bush’s America as the true climate criminals. It was a worthy target and good fun at the time, but an easy hit compared to the far trickier problem of the People’s Republic. Whilst the US continues to offer a pitiful 4% emissions target for 2020, it will rightly bear the brunt of international criticism. But how far will we also be prepared to criticise China?

Western human rights groups have rarely minced their words when it comes to Tibet, Chinese internet censorship or Tiananmen Square. By contrast, climate campaigners have so far felt compromised when considering the problem of Chinese emissions; after all, up to a quarter of them stem from manufacturing goods for the West. We have found it politic to focus our criticisms instead on Western governments, partly for sound ethical reasons – the West bears historical responsibility for climate damages already inflicted, and China has every right to develop – but also because we have little clue how to effectively influence China. True, most of the big green NGOs now have branches in Beijing or Shanghai; a native Chinese environmental movement has existed for some 15 years, though it remains subservient to government; and ChinaDialogue does a good job of stimulating discussion between campaigners. But all this seems a little incommensurate with the scale of the challenge.

I have no answers to this problem, and I’d welcome comments from those who do.  I’ll leave the last words to the BBC’s Richard Black, who frames the dilemma well:

“Having seen the deal emerge that the real leaders of China, India and the other large developing countries evidently wanted, how will those countries now be treated? How do you campaign in China?… The situation is especially demanding for those organisations that have traditionally supported the developing world on a range of issues against what they see as the west’s damaging dominance. After Copenhagen, there is no ‘developing world’ – there are several. Responding to this new world order is a challenge for campaign groups, as it will be for politicians in the old centres of world power.”

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