by Tim Jackson
7. January 2010 07:21
Our pre-COP Earthcast – an Economics fit for a Low Carbon World – attracted a record number of participants. Inevitably, some of them wanted to know what, if anything, the summit might deliver. And how, if at all, the dilemma of economic growth would figure in its deliberations.
As far as delivery goes, I doubt any of us could quite have guessed at the shambles that was about to play out. Two years of preparation delivered two weeks of madness and a couple of hours of sad betrayal. Next time Obama visits Copenhagen, I’d suggest not bringing the whole city to a standstill during the rush hour just so he can get into town from the airport. You should only do that sort of thing for friends.
Personally, I’m working hard to rehabilitate my faith in ‘yes-we-can’ man. But even with Mark Lynas’ helpful insights into the role China played in the debacle, I’m finding it tough. What we saw played out in the closing hours of COP 15 was nothing more nor less than the mutual flexing of economic muscle. Gunboat climate policy. Good old fashioned ‘might is right’. Repercussions for the wreck of the UN climate process will last a long long time.
As for the second question, perhaps there’s a more interesting tale to tell. Not that it’s a massively hopeful one. In fact, at face value, the growth debate barely figured at all in the official business. Business as usual was the default assumption throughout. Anything or anyone that threatened that view was exported, sometimes literally, from the arena.
The European Economic and Social Committee had planned a side event on GDP and the measurement of progress. Helpfully, it had been scheduled for the morning of the final day. And inevitably by the Wednesday of the second week the event had been outlawed from the Bella Centre along with many thousands of NGO observers and all other ‘non-essential’ business.
Just down the road at the Klima Forum – the self-styled people’s climate summit – it was a very different story. From the outset, change was in the air. Grass roots activists of every age, creed and persuasion rubbed shoulders with disenchanted G77 representatives seeking refuge from the dry orthodoxy of the COP. The buzz about the place was palpable. For two entire weeks it hummed with life and colour. And a surprising consensus began to emerge around the need to question, question and question again the prejudices and suppositions that had got us into this mess.
The ill-fated EU side event was my only ‘official’ engagement in the COP. But I’d been invited to give several talks and numerous interviews in Copenhagen during the summit – including two lectures at the Klima Forum and a surreal encounter on Danish TV in which my live interview jostled for airtime with a vox pop from Denmark’s Crown Princess on sustainable fashion.
The focus of these engagements was Prosperity without Growth, of course, which had somehow managed to run on ahead of me, attracting a level of interest that still surprises me. It even made its way – entirely independently of me I assure you – onto a protest placard (see photo) during the demonstration on the middle Saturday. In spite of this heresy advertised in its midst, the event passed off (I hear) with an amazing sense of good humour and a mere 900 arrests from the thoughtfully sensitive Danish police.
Perhaps their plan was to try and round the thousand or so people who had turned up to debate economic growth at the Klima Forum. If so they failed, because one at least of them was nursing a horrible toothache that day and sadly never made it to the march. But our seminar on the Limits to Growth had attracted over 800 people on its own. And even after three hours of discussion the participants just didn’t want to leave. Shoved out only by the incoming event – on corporate culpability for climate change – the discussion spilled into meeting rooms, exhibition halls and the communal eating spaces where young and old alike milled around or lounged on the floor, because somehow comfort seemed the least of anyone’s concerns.
Most of the discussion was rational, intelligent and good-natured. There was a lunatic fringe of course. There always is when speech is truly free. And there was rage there too. The voices of the disenfranchised and the dispossessed rarely speak without at least tinge of anger. And to be honest, some of it was frightening. It had that same sense of menace that I experienced on the Copenhagen streets one morning as angry young men in black faced off against angry young men in dark blue, apparently just willing the fragile morning to dissolve into mindless violence.
This to me is why the discussion around growth matters so much. Why I trekked halfway across Europe and back on crowded trains to get to wonderful wonderful Copenhagen. Why I missed getting my Christmas cards out on time. Why I doused my toothache with painkillers to talk to another thirty or so people in the Anglican church on a freezing cold middle Sunday night. Because chucking people out of the Bella Centre and expelling critical discussions from the table won’t solve the problem of climate change. It will simply generate dissent, anger and eventually violence.
This tale of two summits made one thing plain to me. We stand in urgent need of more honest policy-making, more courageous leadership and a deeper commitment to a fair and lasting prosperity.
On the plus side, the EU event was eventually salvaged. God bless Jacqueline McGlade and the European Environment Agency for that! In the question session afterwards, a young Mexican lad stood up. I’ve been wondering for two weeks why I came here, he said. Today, for the first time, I feel there is some hope.
Miraculously, my toothache was beginning to dissipate.
