Motion on Copenhagen failure

I’ve today lodged this motion at Holyrood, in the hope that MSPs will be more vocal in their criticism than the UK Government has been so far.

S3M-05444 – Brokenhagen
That the Parliament condemns the disgraceful sham, known as the Copenhagen Accord, agreed by certain governments at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP15), an accord that has no legally binding status and that contains no date for the peaking of global emissions, no global or national targets for subsequent cutting of emissions and no commitment to provide new financial resources from wealthy countries; condemns in particular the governments of the United States, China, Brazil, India and South Africa for brokering this accord and the UK Government for failing to condemn it; further condemns the decision to exclude key non-governmental organisations from the COP15 venue and the decision to announce this sham agreement to the US media before the parties to the conference had seen it; agrees with the words of President Barak Obama when he said that the ability of the world’s political leaders to take collective action against climate change was in question and considers that, by his own actions, the President has provided a starkly negative answer to this question, and believes that the outcome of the COP15 summit, once hailed as ‘Hopenhagen’, in fact demonstrates the abject failure of the current generation of political leaders in major nations around the world.

Copenhagen update 4 – Obama underwhelms

My last few hours in Copenhagen. As I write this there’s a little over two hours till my train leaves the station. But as the climate change conference moves on from Cop15 it seems that the chances of a meaningful agreement disappeared long ago.

It’s still possible that some kind of deal will be signed, but it now looks impossible that it will commit either to substantial emission cuts or to the kind of financing that developing countries need. When Barak Obama rose to speak from the Bella Center, the atmosphere at the Klimaforum was hushed. Many people were still hoping for a change of position from the US, but all we got was a restatement of the familiar lines – a 17% by 2020, a pledge of $10bn, and commitments on accountability. We’ve heard this all before, and it’s wildly inadequate.

Even the rhetoric was toned down – there was a welcome recognition that “this is not fiction, this is science”, and that previous rounds of negotiations and agreements have achieved next to nothing. But after that, the speech ended with a damp squib of a message – let’s just all recognise that we’re not going to get what we want, and settle for what we can salvage from this wreck of a conference. Those weren’t his exact words of course, but that’s what it boiled down to. As one activist put it, “was that it? He could have made a bigger impact by leaving Air Force One at home”.

It’s a sad truth that while the science of climate change has moved on dramaically and the impact on many thousands of people around the world is already palpable, the politics is still stuck with short term national self interest. Far too many countries are still doing what the US has been doing for years – blocking any chance of real action.

This lunchtime the Fossil of the Year Award was given to… surprise surprise… Canada, here shown in the person of Stephen Harper accepting the accolade for the country which has done most to scupper a deal:

Part of that shame is due to the UK too – we own the banks which are investing in Canada’s tar sands, like the RBS, yet the UK Government has done absolutely nothing to take responsibility for this, any more than they will take publicly owned banks’ money out of the arms trade, or out of any of the countless forms of economic and environmental exploitation we’re currently funding around the world.

Very soon after Labour came to office, the commitment to an “ethical foreign policy” was reduced to a sick joke. Now the hypocrisy has been taken to a new level, as Gordon Brown tries to strike a progressive pose on the world stage yet allows nationalised banks to pursue investment policies utterly devoid of any tinge of conscience.

Copenhagen update 3 – pessimism grows

For observers at the COP15 conference, things have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous. Having barred all non-governmental delegates (which includes parliamentarians, academics, industry, unions, and even most media) from the conference venue, they have now set up an “alternative forum” at which we can watch a video feed from the main plenary, and enjoy free wifi and a hot dog stand.

Here’s what it looks like:

Even with Hillary Clinton as the draw, the place is like a ghost ship:

This comes a day after the arbitrary decision to exclude first some NGOs like Friends of the Earth, and then all non-governmental delegates. You can’t fall into discussion with anyone here without hearing a rant about the abysmal organisation of this conference.

It’s also the general mood here that the chances are dwindling that common ground can be found between the countries which support binding emission targets and those which don’t. Indeed today the rumour that those countries which do support targets will tomorrow launch a proposal for a stand-alone deal between themselves. This would be an act of understandable exasperation, and I’m all for those who want to take action without waiting for the world to catch up. But it would also be a signal of failure for the whole process which has led from the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, and would make a follow-up to Copenhagen even more unlikely.

Of course, many of the positions taken in the final days of a conference like this could be seen as brinkmanship, and the possibility remains that the ‘world leaders’ will want to stage a dramatic rescue for the conference on the final day. It would be a shallow and pathetic ploy, but at this stage it might just be the best we can hope for.

Politics really sucks sometimes. I keep trying to tell myself that our species will ultimately choose not to commit suicide, but sitting here close to the end of a deeply depressing conference I’m finding my natural optimism very hard to justify.

Copenhagen update 2

OK, things are still a little chaotic here. However I have managed to actually get inside the conference venue today, following yesterday’s nightmare. Even today, it took four hours of queueing! But here I am.

It’s immense, and there’s far too much to have explored properly yet. There are hundreds of NGO stalls and activist groups (including the lovely anti-nuclear folk above), several huge plenary rooms with spillout and viewing rooms attached, rooms for the formal delegations, and no doubt separate accommodation for the heads of state, who won’t be mingling with the hoi poloi.

The biggest session I’ve been to so far was an address by Al Gore (as you can almost see from my rubbish photo below) who despite remaining committed only to cap-and-trade market mechanisms does manage to inspire a certain amount of positive spirit. I was feeling pretty low on that last night, after the Scottish Government’s extended backslapping exercise, and I needed the lift.

There were one or two unguarded remarks in there – at one point he implicitly admitted that the war in Iraq was all about oil, and at another he forgot his place and seemed to think he was talking in Montreal! I guess we can forgive that – he’s probably far more tired than most people here.

Among the messages he was sending are the call for COP16 to be moved forward to summer instead of next winter, for a deadline of April 22nd for US climate legislation, and (I think) for everyone to give Obama a break. He finished in a strange style of delivery, worthy of Captain Kirk.

Later this evening I’ll be meeting a group which is working in the European Parliament to advance the case for a ’supergrid’ to allow the efficient transfer of electricity between nations and even between continents. It’s the kind of technology we really need in place if we’re to move to a majority of renewable power in the next few decades, and could be a huge source of income for African countries too.

Finally, I really do promise that I’ll try to get a little video update onto the website soon. It’s been a busy time…

Copenhagen update

So we’re finally here. Copenhagen. The climate conference. The final effort to find a global deal to succeed the Kyoto protocol and give the world a chance to combat climate change.

Or rather we’re not. We’re close, but in attempting to register this morning we found ourselves standing alongside thousands of other people in a very long queue which didn’t move. The UN appear to have been trying to register 25000 people for an event with a 15000 capacity. Indeed it’s so crowded that the rumour is that tomorrow even registered delegates will be subject to rationed access to the main conference venue.

So we (myself, Cathy Peattie and Rob Gibson from Holyrood’s Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee) have decided to come straight to the Scottish event and will try to register later. We’ve been hearing so far from Stewart Stevenson (hmmm…) and now he’s being joined by Duncan McLaren of FoES, Scottish Human Rights Commissioner Alan Miller and Ian Marchant of Scottish and Southern Energy, all of whom talk better sense.

I’ll be here for the rest of this week, before taking the sleeper home from Copenhagen on Friday night, so I’ll be sending updates during the week whenever I can find a handy wifi connection. I’m also blogging at the Daily Record, and of course Tweeting the whole thing.

Meantime I’ll leave you with a lovely snap of a turbine whizzing past the train window, which was taken by Graeme who also took the overland route – he started in Edinburgh and our journeys converged at St Pancras. Together we probably saw more wind turbines on one long train ride than exist yet in the whole of Scotland.

NEWS RELEASE – First Minister challenged on aviation

Green MSP Patrick Harvie today used First Minister’s Questions to challenge Alex Salmond over SNP plans on aviation. His administration voted for the Climate Change Bill’s 42% emissions target in June 2009, but still support aviation expansion across Scotland.

The First Minister was asked his view on the UK Climate Change Committee’s report earlier this week, which shows that the projected 200% increase in air travel by 2050 is incompatible with emissions targets. (1) The Committee also confirms that even a 60% increase in aviation would require 90% cuts in emissions elsewhere in the UK economy to achieve an overall reduction of 80%. (2)

Patrick Harvie MSP said:

“Setting targets is the easy bit, but the First Minister today could not or would not take the next step. The SNP’s lack of commitment here was apparent from the moment they declared airport expansion to be ‘national developments of strategic importance’ earlier this year.

“The UK Climate Change Committee could not have been clearer this week. Ministers in London and in Edinburgh have long supported unrestrained aviation growth, but now it’s time to change. The choice is between endless flying and tackling climate change, and the SNP seem determined to back the aviation lobby instead of the climate campaigners.”

Notes

1. For the full Committee report, see www.theccc.org.uk

The Committee’s press release is here.

2. This calculation is on p30 of the full report, available above.

Scotland on Sunday article

Our friends at Scotland on Sunday asked for a view on the last ten years, from an environmetnal perspective. Here’s what we sent them:

As we prepare to enter the second decade of the 21st century, and as the Scottish Parliament ends its celebration of the first ten years of devolution, it is easy to forget just how much progress has been made towards a recognition of the issues which the Green movement has brought to the table, both globally and locally.

At the beginning of the decade the environment was seen by most politicians as just one minor issue among many, despite the early spike in Green votes in 1989. Indeed, during the first debate MSPs held on transport issues climate change was mentioned only once, but it was still not seen as a reason to refrain from big increases in road building. Peak oil, the fact of finite supplies, was still dismissed as a fringe idea by the oil companies which privately knew better, and energy debates in Scotland were typically just sterile disagreements about the ownership of the North Sea’s fossil fuel assets, rather than the sustainability of burning the stuff until it was all gone.

But the turn of the millennium saw the UK’s first Green parliamentarians elected too, in the now familiar shape of Robin Harper here in Scotland, then joined by Caroline Lucas and Jean Lambert representing English regions in Europe.

In wider activism, the road and runway protests of the previous decade inspired a broader range of environmental direct action, with targets including genetically modified crops and the arms trade. For many activists these issues joined the dots between straightforward environmental causes and the social and economic consequences of corporate power. Links developed with those who were campaigning on other aspects of global justice such as health and trade reform; many people who eventually joined the Make Poverty History movement began their political journey with the anti-GM movement and an awareness of food politics.

In the global political arena these were also the early days of the Kyoto Protocol, the world’s first serious attempt to secure a political deal on climate change. While it’s abundantly clear now that the emission limits established in that deal were wildly inadequate, the significance of placing climate change onto the world’s political agenda can’t be understated. This was the achievement of the third global conference on climate change, and as we approach the fifteenth this month in Copenhagen it shouldn’t be forgotten that the early groundwork had to start somewhere – Kyoto might not have met the high expectations, but without it we’d be in a far worse position today. The EU ratified the Protocol just two years into the decade, but the treaty didn’t come into force until 2005, something which seems hard to believe now.

These middle years of this decade provided crucial impetus for urgent action on climate change, with 2006 seeing both Al Gore’s surprise box office hit ‘An Inconvenient Truth’, and the publication of the landmark Stern Review. They spoke to different audiences, Gore presenting the public with perhaps the first film you could describe as “conviction powerpoint”, and Lord Stern addressing his arguments to the world’s economists and Governments, but each helped to bring a wider group of people to the cause.

Environmental organisations and campaigners have long said that every part of society needs to play its part, including governments, businesses, communities and individuals, and these two pieces of work did more to turn that into a reality than anything before. It’s hard to imagine private sector voices calling for bold cuts in emissions if Lord Stern hadn’t made his hard-headed case in the language the business community spoke: every pound spent now on going low-carbon will repay itself five times over.

Even the US began to wake up to climate change, and long before the anti-science Bush administration was wound up, several state governors and city mayors had begun to put some of their own political capital on the line for the sake of tackling emissions. By the time American voters were choosing the party nominees for the 2008 election, all the serious front runners were committed to binding cuts and all accepted US responsibility on the issue.

If the progress made in the middle of the 2000s was promising, it’s pretty clear that the end of the decade has seen a troubling reversal. It sometimes seems that the stronger the scientific case becomes, the more irrational opposition is generated in the media debate. Most Governments remain committed to a scientific approach, even if few are ready to take action to meet their targets, and in the UK the conspiracy theories are confined to the far right of politics.

However, this month’s sacking of the Australian Liberal Party leader, replaced by a man opposed to even a modest carbon trading scheme, shows that countries with coal will always find political room for those who want to burn it.

In the UK too, action to start making real-world cuts has been painfully hard to achieve. The recession, which, like the collapse of the Soviet Union, may result in a short-term slowing of emissions, has served to distract many from the long term job of building the low-carbon economy which Stern advocated. Even the clearest opportunities to link emission cuts to economic recovery have not been taken – few people would have predicted that a Scottish Budget would fall on the issue of loft insulation, but energy efficiency remains to this day the best climate change policy we’ve never had – and the pressure on Budgets may well squeeze long term investment in low carbon infrastructure as Governments of all parties continue to put the short term first.

Indeed despite the realities of the world’s energy problems coming into sharper focus every year, it’s still down to activists to challenge decisions at UK and Scottish level, like the approval of new coal-fired power stations, aviation expansion and the continuation of other 20th-century mistakes. Thankfully the energy and dedication seen in previous decades of direct action is still alive, as seen among the Climate Campers and others.

Just as critical for the wider environmental movement is the danger of distracting the world from the host of other issues, many of which are made worse by climate change but which are seen as separate battles to fight. The overharvesting of fish stocks around the world, the impact of deforestation, the loss of biodiversity, and a thousand forms of local pollution and environmental damage which hit the world’s poorest people hardest; these are issues which never went away. Indeed they continue to grow while the world’s attention is fixed on climate change and economic turmoil.

As the good, the bad and the ugly of the political world head to Copenhagen for the last great diplomatic circus of the decade, we’re left with a familiar question: will it make any difference?

The best way to guarantee failure is not to try, but leaving it to the politicians – of whatever party – is a pretty surefire promise of failure too. The Scottish Climate Act did go further than the Government wanted, but not because MSPs suddenly became a nobler body of people. It was strengthened above all because of people-power. Academics, campaign groups, business voices, trades unions, community groups, churches, and tens of thousands of ordinary people called for stronger measures. Without them we wouldn’t have the legislation we have, and unless those many voices continue to act together and call for bold action we won’t turn the targets into a reality either.

I still believe that humanity will opt for survival, but our stunted democracy won’t be up to the job unless real people set the challenge loudly, clearly and consistently. The future of this movement, as we move into another dangerous decade, is in your hands.

Concert Hall / Bus Station update

On 18th November, I submitted the following motion to the Scottish Parliament in order to raise other MSPs’ awareness of the damaging proposals to build on top of Buchanan Bus Station and scrap the Royal Concert Hall Steps.

S3M-05227 Glasgow Royal Concert Hall and Buchanan Bus Station
That the Parliament notes that over a year has passed since Glasgow City Council granted outline planning permission for construction of a multistorey car park on top of Buchanan Bus Station, to expand the retail space at Buchanan Galleries by up to two thirds and to demolish the popular Royal Concert Hall steps and replace them with a shopping centre entrance; further notes the objections made to the planning application relating to the bus station by Strathclyde Partnership for Transport and Transport Scotland and the concerns expressed by the city’s major bus operators; shares their concerns that building on top of the bus station would diminish the attractiveness of the space and limit future flexibility and the development of bus services; acknowledges that improvements in accessibility to the Royal Concert Hall and better maintenance of the steps are desirable but rejects the idea that this requires the removal of the open, communal space of the steps and their replacement with another commercial facade; agrees that it is vital that public awareness of these plans is greatly increased, and calls on Glasgow City Council to assume responsibility for encouraging widespread public debate and engagement with the ongoing planning process for these major and contentious projects for Glasgow city centre.

So far, the motion has been signed by Dr Bill Wilson MSP, Bill Kidd MSP, Bob Doris MSP, Gil Paterson MSP and Robin Harper MSP. If you’d like to help the campaign, you could contact your MSPs who have not yet signed the motion and ask them to do so. Everyone in Scotland has a Constituency MSP who represents their local area and a number of Regional MSPs. You could also e-mail to your Glasgow councillors to seek their view about the proposals. You e-mail any of your political representatives direct from www.writetothem.com or find their full contact details at www.scottish.parliament.uk or www.glasgow.gov.uk

In other campaign news, I met recently with First Bus Director, Mark Savelli to discuss his concerns about serious and lengthy disruption to bus services and intensified traffic congestion that could result from construction at Buchanan Bus Station. I’ve also been in touch with bus companies Arriva and Stagecoach with a view to meeting up to discuss their similar concerns. I will also be meeting with SPT chair, Councillor Alistair Watson, to talk about the proposals.

Finally, my colleague Green Councillor Nina Baker – a stalwart opponent of the Buchanan proposals since they were first tabled – and some good friends spent a reasonably dry Saturday afternoon carrying out a straw poll of the public in the vicinity of Buchanan Bus Station and the Royal Concert Hall Steps. The results are presently being collated – watch this space!