By bringing forward plans for carbon tariffs the EU can make the post-Copenhagen outlook a bit less bleak
THE REVELATION that last November’s floods and the Arctic conditions that followed will cost insurance companies €541 million should bring home to us the very real risks of extreme weather events – not least because we’re all going to be paying for them through an increase of up to 20 per cent in household insurance premiums.
Worldwide, the cost to the insurance sector – it’s plain wrong to call it an “industry” – will run into billions. Other countries in the northern hemisphere were hit by blizzards, huge snowfalls turning to ice and record low temperatures extending over long periods. Met Éireann said it was Ireland’s coldest winter for more than four decades.
Here, as elsewhere, the prolonged cold spell led many to query the climate change consensus among scientists. "So much for all that guff about global warming!", even The Irish Timesthundered. "Are world leaders having the wrong debate? We are experiencing the most prolonged period of icy weather in 40 years and feeling every bit of it."
What our leader-writer seemed to forget, in the heat of the moment as it were, was that there’s a big difference between weather, which is transient, and climate, which is rather more long-term. And overall, the past decade was the warmest since records began in 1850, according to the World Meteorological Organisation – followed by the 1990s.
Yet the public has become increasingly sceptical about global warming. A recent poll in Britain found that the number of people who believe that climate change is “definitely” happening has fallen from 44 per cent to 31 per cent in the past year – mainly because the weather had been so cold this winter. Doubts about the science was also a factor.
The scandal of data being massaged at the University of Essex climate research unit and a belated admission by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that it was wrong to predict in 2007 that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 have dented public confidence in the scientists, particularly in the United States.
Americans now view climate change as the least urgent of 21 social and economic issues, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, with just 28 per cent identifying “dealing with global warming” as a top priority, down from 38 per cent in 2007. Some would see this as a tribute to the virulent campaign of climate change denial in the US.
President Obama has his work cut out for him. If he can’t get even a heavily-diluted version of his healthcare plan through the US Congress, what chance does he have of persuading senators to pass legislation on climate change, with the aim of cutting US emissions, in the face of a sceptical public and powerful lobbies bent on stopping it?
More than 100 days after the Copenhagen summit ended inconclusively, the outlook is bleak. Yvo de Boer, the UN’s climate chief, is stepping down on July 1st – frustrated by the lack of real progress and lured by a presumably lucrative offer from international consultancy group KPMG to become its “global adviser on climate and sustainability”.
His resignation is "pretty bad news for the process", according to Fiona Harvey, Belfast-born environment correspondent of the Financial Times.
Speaking by video link from London to a symposium at the Institute for International and European Affairs (IIEA), she said it was “not helpful to lose the captain of the ship at this point in the voyage”.
Noting that both BP and ConocoPhillips withdrew last month from the US Climate Action Partnership, Harvey said: “What’s needed now to get the process back on track is to tackle the climate sceptics, with visible reform at IPCC, possibly a new chairman, to make sure that it still has the faith of the general public. Otherwise, things will fall apart.”
If the US and China don’t play ball, where does that leave Europe? A full year before the Copenhagen summit, the EU pledged to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 and also offered to boost this to 30 per cent if others – notably the US and China – were to show more ambition. But they didn’t, and the EU’s higher offer is off.
Although the Copenhagen Accord fell far short of Europe’s ambitions, a recent analysis by the IIEA suggested that it “remains unspecific enough for the EU to promote its agenda” in negotiations leading to the UN’s 16th climate change conference in Mexico City next December. “In order for this to happen, decisive action will be required,” it said.
The EU has long claimed a leadership role in the climate negotiations, but member states squabbled among each other on the final day in Copenhagen about what to do when they were faced with the terms of the deal cobbled together by the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. The emergence of this “new world order” left Europe stranded.
“Although the EU’s power in this new world order will be diminished, it still has many instruments at its disposal,” according to the IIEA, which proposed that the European Commission should “immediately begin the process of bringing forward proposals for carbon tariffs of up to 9 per cent” on imports from countries that aren’t matching EU efforts.
Such a radical step, which might even be compatible with the World Trade Organisation’s rules, would certainly show that Europe is serious about tackling climate change – whatever the weather.