Over in the plaza outside city hall the grounds are filled with Hopenhagen Live booths demonstrating all sorts of next-gen green technology, selling organic food, and demonstrating how we all may benefit from them in the future. I wonder if Naomi Klein bothered to pay attention to the enthusiasm of the visitors when she called the notion of it all “utterly ridiculous”:

The name of the campaign may indeed be “juvenile”, as Klein says in her interview with The Uptake — it is indeed a awfully corny pun/neologism — and Klein is entirely 100% correct in her analysis of the gigantic maw between what sort of emission reductions are on the table in the COP15 negotiations and what climate scientists say is required to have a chance at stopping what all of us cramming together in the Bella Center day after day are here to stop.

People Won’t Remember the Name, But They Won’t Forget the Electric Car
But ignore the name of Hopenhagen for a second. Go down and observe the joy with which people peddle bikes around the Future City exhibit, examine the all-electric cars, the new hybrid engines for trains, the people trying to power a Christmas tree by their own effort.Their is joy on their faces, happiness, inquisitiveness, and dare I say, hope.

Hope alone, still less crossed fingers, will not bring about a fair, ambitious and binding climate deal — Klein is also entirely correct on that point — but at the same time the hard message of “not enough, not enough” won’t either.

Like it or not the activist message will not ever reach all of the public, nor politicians and business leaders. Some people are just not ready to hear that, practically or metaphysically.

Many People Just Aren’t Interested…
The first night in Copenhagen I was talking with my waitress at dinner. I wanted to get start to get a sense of what ordinary people in Copenhagen thought about climate change.

She was probably just out of high school and responded that she didn’t really care about the issue. Not that it wasn’t important — she admitted it was a serious problem — but that she was just more concerned with what was in front of her, with creating a happy life for herself, having a good time. Not unreasonable, and probably a common reaction for most people at that age — all the great youth activists in the Bella Center being the exception rather than the rule.

I asked if it was fair to say that global warming wouldn’t be really be a major concern of hers until the water started rising up in the harbor a fifteen minute walk away. She said that would make her concerned.

Different Messages Needed for Different Communities
The point in this story is that different messaging is required for different segments of the population, and that’s not a bad thing. To this young women no amount of rhetoric would get her to care about the future impacts of global warming — unfortunately until it would be too late, but there you go. But perhaps presenting all the new shiny green things of the future would get her interested.

I won’t say there’s a domino effect with getting people into environmental thinking and then progressing to the deeper issues. Though tempting to think so, I’m not sure that’s the case — people just have different inclinations and some internal shift has to taken place, even if just a small one to move them to deeper green concerns.

But I will say I just can’t liken Hopenhagen to something juvenile as Klein does after walking around and seeing people’s reactions to it.

When world leaders gather in Copenhagen on Monday for negotiations on a new agreement to combat the threat of catastrophic climate change, their success or failure will ride on economics, not environmental science.

Theoretically, the two-week conference will focus on limiting the heat-trapping gas emissions blamed for global warming. But its major debates will all center on money, including questions of how emissions limits would affect major industries and the jobs they provide ? and how a new climate treaty could reshape the global economic playing field.

Those issues sharply divide some of the most important players at the conference.

For China and nearly all of Europe, the issue offers tempting opportunities to expand industries and create jobs by developing and selling new technologies for wind, solar, nuclear and other low-emission energy ? especially if there is a strong agreement to move away from the carbon-based energy sources that have powered the developed world for more than a century.

Many of those nations, particularly the Chinese, devoted huge chunks of their recent economic stimulus measures to low-emission energy technology. “You’re seeing a shift in developing countries,” said Ned Helme, a climate policy veteran who is president of the Center for Clean Air Policy in Washington. “Rather than looking out and saying, ‘how do we protect our old cement kilns,’ they’re looking forward to clean energy as their new market.”

Meanwhile, the most immediate concern of nations such as the United States, Canada and India is the potential economic and political cost of imposing tighter limits on greenhouse gas emissions limits ? particularly for domestic coal, oil and manufacturing industries.

For example, the Obama administration’s push to combat climate change and create “clean energy” jobs ? which included more than $80 billion in stimulus dollars for energy technology ? has been slowed by resistance in Congress from representatives of parts of the country that produce coal and oil or depend on those energy sources for power and manufacturing.

Tension between the possibilities and pitfalls of a low-carbon energy future runs through every major negotiating topic, including how deeply individual nations will cut their emissions and how much richer countries are willing to spend to help poorer countries adopt cleaner energy sources and adapt to a warming world.

“One of the reasons that this negotiation is difficult is it really does involved issues of competitive and comparative advantage between countries,” said Nick Main, the global managing partner for climate change and sustainability at the analyst firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.

“I don’t think there will be any science debate of any substance,” he added. “This is really an economic debate of, how do you pay the costs?”

In the dozen years since the first climate treaty was signed in Kyoto, partisans on both sides have fought pitched battles over the science of global warming ? how serious the threat is, how rapidly conditions are changing and what role carbon emissions play in the problem.

Their war of words intensified in recent weeks following the release of thousands of e-mails between leading climate scientists that skeptics say undercut the evidence of man-made climate change.

But over the same time period, the leaders of the world’s largest and fastest-growing nations have reached a broad consensus on the fundamentals:

With rare exceptions, the negotiators in Copenhagen agree that the earth is warming; that humans are largely to blame; and that current trends in greenhouse gas emissions will likely result in flooding, drought and death in many parts of the world.

While some of the debate at the conference will focus on how much emissions must be reduced in order to lower the probability of catastrophic warming, the big disagreements center on what to do about the cost of change.

Poorer countries want the developed world to help finance their energy transition. That could mean tens ? or by some proposals, hundreds ? of billions of dollars a year in direct aid and technology transfer from nations such as Japan and the United States to less developed nations.

By some reckonings, that could result in U.S. dollars flowing to China ? a politically unpalatable prospect.

How much money Obama is willing to pledge for developing countries will be one key to the negotiations, said Abe Haspel, a lead climate negotiator during the Clinton administration who is now president of the Cogent Analysis Group.

“And can he sell the notion that a lot of that money is going to China or to India?” Haspel asked.

Another issues is whether the various emissions reduction targets that individual nations are proposing would some an unfair edge. Europe is already on its way to steep cutbacks. The Obama administration has pledged much more modest reductions for the United States.

China and India say they will emit less as a share of their economies, but because both countries are growing so fast, their emissions could still rise overall. A group of Senate Democrats considered swing votes on a climate bill ? most of them from manufacturing states ? warned Obama in a letter this week that “reciprocal commitments are essential” to any international agreement.

Environmentalists insist that the potential for clean-energy jobs will change the dynamics of the coming negotiations.

“This is the first time that a president will negotiate a deal in an atmosphere of economic cooperation, instead of economic fear,” Jeremy Symons, a senior vice president at the National Wildlife Federation, said this week.

jtankersley@latimes.com
Jim Tankersley Washington Bureau

BBC News

Three UK groups studying climate change have issued an unprecedented statement about the dangers of failing to cut emissions of greenhouse gases.

The Royal Society, Met Office, and Natural Environment Research Council say the science underpinning climate change is more alarming than ever.

They say the 2007 UK floods, 2003 heatwave in Europe and recent droughts were consistent with emerging patterns.

Their comments came ahead of crunch UN climate talks in Copenhagen next month.

‘Loss of wildlife’

In a statement calling for action to cut carbon emissions, institutions said evidence for “dangerous, long-term and potentially irreversible climate change” was growing.

Global carbon dioxide levels have continued to rise, Arctic summer ice cover declined sharply in 2007 and 2008, and the last decade has been the warmest on average for 150 years.

Persistent drought in Australia and rising sea levels in the Maldives were further indicators of possible future patterns, they said.

They argue that without action there would be much larger changes in the coming decades, with the UK seeing higher food prices, ill health, more flooding and rising sea levels.

Known or probable damage across the world includes ocean acidification, loss of rainforests, degradation of ecosystems and desertification, they said.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned the world faced more droughts, floods, loss of wildlife, rising seas and refugees.

But Prof Julia Slingo, chief scientist of the Met Office, Prof Alan Thorpe, chief executive of Nerc, and Lord Rees, president of the Royal Society, said cutting emissions could substantially limit the severity of climate change.

Meanwhile, a White House official has said the US will announce a target for reducing greenhouse gas emissions before next month’s Copenhagen summit.

President Barack Obama has not yet decided whether to attend.

Some countries in the world are more worried about global warming than others. The Maldives, for example, might be drowned by rising sea levels. And Nepal fears being flooded by melting mountain glaciers. I wrote recently about their governments meeting in unusual places to highlight their common plight.

They are tired of waiting around for the rich nations to pull everybody out of this mess. So the president of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, is hosting a two-day conference, called the Maldives Forum for Climate Vulnerable Countries, for the 11 countries most at risk from global warming, according to Voice of America. The participating countries are Kiribati, Bangladesh, Nepal, Vietnam, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Barbados and Bhutan, reports Act on Copenhagen.

In a welcome address, Maldivian Environment Minister Mohamed Aslam said, “The countries represented in this room are diverse but they have one thing in common: their vulnerability to climate change.”

Nasheed scolded heavy-emissions countries that don’t face such immediate peril for not doing enough to slow and reverse global warming. He then called on the conference participants to join him in taking “moral leadership” on the issue and creating a “global survival pact” to take the lead on climate action.

While empowering small nations to act assertively is good, one hopes that it will be clear at the global summit on climate change in Copenhagen next month that we are all, in fact, vulnerable countries.

By Katherine Gustafson