The boiling point is coming for the fight against climate change

Environmentalists must use their anger at the government's betrayal on global warming to mobilise the mainstream Madeleine BuntingMonday January 16, 2006The Guardian
A debate is being conducted across at least four government departments that will have momentous consequences. What is being thrashed out is the level of the proposed cap on the UK's carbon emissions as part of the European Union's carbon emissions trading scheme - the central plank of the EU's commitment to Kyoto. It's the crunch moment for this government's commitment to doing anything effective on climate change. Forget all the nice speeches. This technical decision is the key signal of whether it's "business as usual" or if Tony Blair is finally ready to start handing out the kind of medicine needed if Kyoto is to mean anything.

On this proposed cap on emissions hinges another important Whitehall pronouncement that has been awaited for nearly a year - now due in March. The climate change programme review is supposed to spell out how 20% emission cuts will be achieved by 2010. This has been the subject of no less than three manifesto commitments and was once regarded as the keystone of Labour's environmental credentials. Given that emissions have been rising since 1997, nothing shows up Labour's shabby green credentials more starkly than the impossibility of it now fulfilling this pledge.
It is on climate change that Labour has chalked up its worst record since it came to power. Tony Blair may have been good on the rhetoric in the run-up to the G8 last year (though his wobbles on Kyoto did huge damage) but the domestic front has been an abysmal failure of broken promises and backtracking. "Betrayal" doesn't quite convey the intensity of the environmental movement's shock at how, despite all the evidence of the urgency of tackling climate change piled up by scientists over 2005, the government has succeeded in doing very little other than reigniting an old (and many can reasonably argue, irrelevant) debate about the nuclear option.
But the anger and frustration is only intensified by the fact that, frankly, outside a few well-informed environmental activists, nobody is much bothered. The environment was virtually invisible in the 2005 election. Even more galling, environmentalists saw the hundreds of thousands of development campaigners pouring on to the streets of Edinburgh and the millions who watched Live8 and asked themselves: why can't we match that?
Looked at objectively it makes no sense. Climate change will dwarf the damage the common agricultural policy subsidies wreak on African farmers; it is already costing at least 150,000 lives a year as warmer temperatures encourage disease, and erratic rainfall will starve millions in coming years. Here is an issue that makes all the aid and debt deals of 2005 look like an afternoon parlour game. Yet such was the momentum of the Make Poverty History campaign that climate change slipped off the public radar and environmental groups felt they couldn't compete.
But with Make Poverty History itself now history, there's a frantic scramble. The environmental movement has got to get its act together fast. There's a sense of almost desperate urgency: it needs mass mobilisation in the next two years if the 2009 post-Kyoto targets are to be as bold as they must be. There are only 10 years left if emissions are to start falling after 2015, as they must if we are to keep below the vital benchmark of a two-degree increase in temperature (or face catastrophic mayhem).
There's general agreement that without mass mobilisation, the politicians drift along, saying the right things and doing precisely the opposite (such as expanding Heathrow and building homes and roads without any regard for how they boost emissions). But how to effect that mass mobilisation, even the question of whether such action on climate change is possible, is splitting necessary allies and fragmenting scarce energies among environmentalists.
Reverberating across the Atlantic is a passionate debate in the US, triggered in 2004 by Adam Werbach, a former head of the environmental group the Sierra Club, who claimed that environmentalism was failing. Jonathan Porritt, in his recent book, Capitalism: As if the World Matters, mounts a coruscating attack on the UK environment movement for its lack of effectiveness: it's "too narrow, too technical, too anti-business, too depressing, often too dowdy and too heard-it-all-before" runs his charge sheet. "There is a risk of the movement failing," he concludes in an interview.
Many accept that the movement is moving into a new, more difficult phase. The first 30 years were the easy bit, argues Tom Burke, a long-time environmentalist. Campaigns on specific issues such as clean air or water or cuddly animals had clear enemies and, crucially, generated more winners than losers. The second phase is much tougher because on climate change the campaign has to be to change our own behaviour: we are the enemies and we will be the losers. "No to low-cost flights to Ibiza" is never going to be a popular rallying cry.
That leads to a division of opinion on strategy. Most of the environmental groups have joined a coalition in imitation of Make Poverty History - Stop Climate Chaos - launched in September, and the hope is that it can begin to get people on to streets in the numbers needed to make Westminster take stock, but it has singularly failed to make much impact as yet.
Some argue that demonstrations are a waste of time; they only work in so far as they give committed politicians some extra muscle, but they don't achieve the political Damascene conversion needed. So there is discussion about how to bring the weight of the huge (and largely passive) supporter bases to bear in other ways. Sell them clean energy? Get them, probably the most sympathetic element of public opinion, to sign up to lifestyle changes? Big giants such as the RSPB, with its million-plus members, or the World Wildlife Fund could then begin to wield some real clout.
Finally, there is the apocalypse contingent. They've lost all patience with the public and political apathy. They're banking on a kind of global electrical convulsion therapy. Only when people begin to clock that fossil fuels are running out, prices are rising sharply and economies are collapsing - Jeremy Leggett's book Half Gone suggests this could be as soon as 2008 - will the realisation dawn that we need to invest billions in renewable energies. In the meantime, runs this argument, the biggest breakthroughs are being made by corporations whose future earnings depend on it, such as BP and its investment in renewables. Leggett argues that the brightest moment of 2005 was when the chief executive of Wal-Mart astonished corporate America by announcing its decision to make a 20% cut in emissions from all its stores worldwide within seven years and to favour suppliers who did likewise.
Are environmentalists failing? They are certainly failing to mobilise anything like the political will and public engagement to deal with the issue of climate change. It's time they got their act together - and so did we. We need brilliant campaigning of the kind that got an obscure financial issue such as third world debt into the mainstream political agenda in the 90s.
m.bunting@guardian.co.uk