Why actions, not words, will decide the outcome of UN climate talks: An interview with John Ashton
Following fractious climate talks at Warsaw last year, governments have a lot of ground to cover over the next 18 months if they are to reach a binding emissions agreement. Britain’s former lead climate negotiator, John Ashton, calls on governments to look at the ambition of their own climate policies to create the momentum they need to forge a credible accord in the negotiations.
Looking ahead to 2015, when countries must reach a final agreement to limit emissions, what is your assessment of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) cycle?
The phase running from now to the UN meeting in Paris in 2015 is really important. Somehow, we need to do in these two years what we have failed to do so far, which is to build the political foundation for a very rapid shift from a high carbon growth model to one which is very low carbon, more resource efficient and much more resilient.
The negotiations are a key part of this, but the forces that will decide whether the negotiations succeed lie in the politics of growth and jobs and competitiveness in the major economies. The fate of the climate negotiations will depend not so much on what’s going on at the moment inside them but what’s going on outside them. This will shape the political context that sets the level of ambition for the negotiators’ instructions.
Which countries do you see as the key driving forces creating the momentum for that kind of shift?
I want to start this answer with a health warning. The people who are engaged in the negotiations and the debate about them have had a terrible tendency over the years to think about countries as if they have no internal structure. That’s not a reflection of reality and not a helpful way to think about countries if you want to make the negotiations work.
We see a very heated debate all over the world over where jobs, growth, security and economic competitiveness are going to come from. We’ve been through an enormous economic shock with the crisis that began in 2008 and is still playing itself out through the world economy in many ways.
It has created a lot of tension between the incumbent forces of business as usual – people who want to cling to the familiar, market-dominated approach to running an economy – and those who challenge that and say we need to be much more active in how we structure the economy. The outcome on climate will depend on the resolution of those battles.
An example is the rise of local energy cooperatives in Germany where local electricity schemes have reached such a scale that they’re challenging the big utilities’ business model, making it harder for them to raise finance. It’s a very disruptive force – and that’s purely internal to Germany. Yet if you want to make the climate negotiations succeed, you have to understand how that’s happening in a country like Germany. Otherwise, the international conversation won’t be focusing in the right way on domestic processes.
Which countries are having the most potentially transformative debates of this kind?
In a sense, that debate is in motion in most of the major economies. People feel the future will be worse than the past. There was a very interesting global opinion survey by Pew which said in the America nearly 70 per cent of people think that today’s children will be worse off than their parents. In Germany, it’s over 70 per cent, and in France, it’s over 90 per cent.
That’s a very powerful signal in politics. For the last few generations the underlying assumption of politics has been that we can build a better future all the time. And all of a sudden the future doesn’t feel as if it’s going to be better. It means that the public are losing confidence with their leaderships – not just their political leaderships, but their business and institutional leaderships. And that creates a growing space for the forces of populism and demagoguery. That’s what we’re seeing in some European countries for example, and it’s very dangerous.
The challenge is to find a more constructive response to that crisis of confidence. It’s a challenge to incumbencies and establishments, but at the moment they’re not rising to it. If the response to that challenge doesn’t include an effective response to climate change, then it won’t be a credible response. And nor will it be capable of rallying together the combination of forces that can rebuild confidence in the future. You can’t expect international climate change negotiators to bear the full weight of that project alone.
What we accomplish in the climate negotiations will be determined at the moment far more by the interplay of those external forces than it will by the negotiation itself. There has to be more of a realisation of this within the negotiating community. Then they will be better able to connect with some of those external dynamics in a way which will be mutually reinforcing.
So do the negotiators just see the climate talks in a bubble – separate from national and international politics?
If you’re a negotiator you tend to think, ‘what’s the best agreement we can get’? It’s like doing a crossword puzzle. What’s the downward word we can put in that space that will fit with all of those other words that have to go across?
But with climate change, that’s not enough. There isn’t a lowest common denominator solution available. We know what we need to do – that’s to come up with a response that is compatible with keeping anthropogenic climate change on the right side of the internationally agreed threshold of no more than two degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels.
The lowest common denominator is just a slightly enhanced version of business as usual when we need transformation. The two are incompatible, so you can’t credibly pretend the first is a useful step to the second; nor can you build a compromise between the two. The problem here is not so much the scale of what needs to be done; it’s the timetable within which we need to do it. Two degrees means a zero carbon energy system within little more than a generation.
I strongly suspect it will be impossible to get an agreement that says, ‘we can’t do two degrees but let’s just agree to do the best we can’. Too many people would point out that it’s not enough given the judgment that governments have come to over where the threshold of dangerous climate change lies.
On the other hand, it’s hard to know how you would get a two degree deal if you’re a negotiator without transformational politics taking place outside the negotiations. That’s where the level of ambition is set within which you are authorised to make commitments.
The solution is diplomacy in the old-fashioned sense. Not agreeing a treaty, but building the political foundations in the major economies and elsewhere that is strong enough for a sufficiently ambitious treaty to stand on, bringing to life the low carbon growth model. The outcomes of Warsaw, and the early signs about the 2014 summit, show that even the small part of this foundation that has been built seems to be crumbling. A jolt of political electricity is urgently needed.
How can that transformation be achieved in practical terms?
You have to concentrate on the energy system, where the rubber hits the road. How do we get from carbon-intensive to carbon neutral in energy, transport, electricity and heating? That’s the measure of it. That’s what you have to see happening on the ground. That’s about policy giving private capital the right signals to invest in a different kind of future.
All energy markets are policy-driven. They are not free markets. That’s where you will be able to tell whether this is working or not. The key question for negotiators is are we coming up with something that will convince the world of private capital that this thing is now on.
Governments will have to do whatever it takes to drive our private capital in a low carbon direction rather than a business as usual direction. An interesting analogy was the commitment the European Central Bank made when the Euro crisis was in its acute phase when they said they would do whatever it will take to stabilise the situation. The markets believed them – it was a credible promise, so stabilisation became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s the kind of commitment we need.
At the moment the world of private capital does not believe governments have the will to put those policy frameworks in place at the necessary level of ambition. They’re not interested in voluntary commitments governments make because words are cheap.
What other developments could help create the momentum needed?
There is a problem: politicians are distracted. I don’t think any government or leadership around the world is giving the degree of attention to this challenge that it would need to get to the place I’ve tried to describe.
It’s encouraging that President Obama seems resolved to press ahead with climate policy despite opposition in Congress. The jury is out on what he can accomplish, but it’s a positive sign. And in the world of diplomacy, I don’t know of any leading international political figure that has the same track record and commitment on climate change as Secretary of State John Kerry. I think he will play a key role in politics over the next few years.
The debate in China is also very interesting. There are different voices debating how fast China should be moving toward a low carbon growth model. There are people saying the next five-year plan should include a cap on carbon for example. And there’s an awful lot of investment going into the low carbon economy in China, probably more than any other economy.
European leaders are rather distracted at the moment, perhaps understandably so due to the crisis in the Eurozone and the very sluggish performance of European economies. But Europe’s role remains absolutely vital. If it doesn’t start to pay attention to this issue then that will be very unhelpful because in many ways, Europe has gone further down this road than any other economy so far, by legislating for binding carbon commitments up to 2020 and building national frameworks that reflect that binding approach, for example.
We have to summon the will to build on that with more ambitious goals for 2030 than currently seem to be in the frame. There is no sign that the European Commission’s President, or his peers in member states, understand why this is essential – not just for the economy, but as part of a revitalised political rationale for the European project itself.
If you have distracted leaderships it’s very hard to summon will. Otherwise, we just lapse into a situation where everyone says they’re tired of leading and they want to wait until other people have done a bit more. If that is the dominant psychology for the climate process then it will be a failed process before it even gets to the next stage.
What would you say to negotiators gearing up to the Paris negotiations?
The test for this whole conversation over the next two years is to persuade those allocating private capital that governments have the will to shift away from business as usual.
What will it take from the climate negotiations to make them decide that this is on? The commitments must have the scale and the believability. Somewhere, there is a combination of the two that will convince them that it is on, not off. And that’s the question the negotiators need to be asking themselves every day. How can we get over that threshold so that we’re on instead of off in the eyes of the people that are looking at us?
Governments have a terrible tendency to talk about managing expectations, as if expectations could be shaped by what governments say. The news for governments is that nobody believes them anymore. A promise by a government is almost meaningless in in a world where people are losing confidence in the future. It’s not words but actions that matter.