What planet is Mark Lynas on?

Six Degrees – Our future on a hotter planet by Mark Lynas is one of the most important books I have ever read. I have given away something like 100 copies of that book. It is fundamental to my understanding of why we need to take immediate and dramatic action on climate change.

However I started to worry about Mark when he flip-flopped his way to a new position on nuclear saying that it was suddenly a critical part of the solution even though a new round of atomic power stations will never be opened in time to solve the 2016 energy gap, will be incredibly expensive and will only ever produce a tiny proportion of our electricity. Not to mention the waste of effort and the effort of dealing with the waste.

Another infamous flip-flop came after he said that flying was tantamount to a suicide bomber inflicting mass casualties. He later retracted that line saying that “flying isn’t analogous to child abuse”. Which is it, Mark?

Now he says China singlehandedly derailed the Copenhagen negotiations. How does he know? Because he was there. Where? In the room where the so-called “Copenhagen Accord” was negotiated by a group of countries led by the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. That meeting took place outside the framework of the main UN conference. It was a sidebar designed to create the illusion that a successful deal had been struck.

As I’ve said before it the “Copenhagen Accord” is a fudged, inadequate, non-binding deal, which the UN Conference on Climate Change did not agree and which has weakened the structures of international decision-making. The “Accord” speaks of the need to keep global warming below 2ºC but does nothing to achieve that goal. Indeed the cuts currently on the table take us past 3ºC and into runaway climate change territory. It is a voluntary agreement that nobody need observe; a stitch-up by those who created the problem; a bad deal that is worse than no deal.

But the hasty and chaotic negotiations that led up to the “Copenhagen Accord” cannot be allowed to wipe out what came before.

The US has put 28% of all the manmade greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and yet the US negotiator at Copenhagen refused to accept any responsibility for historical emissions. China is responsible for 8% of all historical emissions and much of those are the West’s outsourced emissions.

The US offered almost nothing in terms of emissions cuts. 17% on 2005 levels translates into 4% on 1990 levels which is the baseline everyone else is working to.

The US spent most of Copenhagen saying it wasn’t going to give a penny to China and that China needed to allow inspectors in to verify its emissions. China gave way on both these issues – saying it wouldn’t take western money and it would allow some independent verification. And the £100bn Obama promised to contribute to turns out to be mostly loans or rehashed already promised funds.

The meeting Mark was in as an adviser to the Maldives was not the UN conference – it was a conference wrecking sidebar, which may have done lasting damage to multilateral decision-making structures.

And how does India escape the general opprobrium when Ed Miliband described it as a such a key player in the run-up to Copenhagen. India’s leaders are remarkably shortsighted about climate change. At 2 degrees of global warming India will be decimated by sea level rises, more frequent hurricanes, a dramatically altered monsoon and a massive reduction in melt water available for for irrigation coming off the Himalayan glaciers. Yet post-Copenhagen India’s Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh has been strutting around delighted because the “Accord” commits his country to nothing and “doesn’t infringe India’s sovereignty”.

Mark Lynas may have been in the “Copenhagen Accord” negotiations and may have seen Obama struggling to negotiate with an obstructive “second tier [Chinese Foreign Ministry] official”, but I think he’s suffering from the effects of an illness known as Western spin if he thinks China singlehandedly wrecked the Copenhagen conference. The truth is that everyone is to blame for the fiasco that was Copenhagen and nobody more so than the US, the only country which could really change the direction of travel of all the rest.