If climate change protest is to work, it must be realistic

There has never been a more acute sense among the student population that climate change is worth protesting about. Barely a week passes without students protesting at a coal-fired power station or lobbying and environmentally reckless company.

Environmental concern has fuelled the creation of groups such as Camp for Climate Action which was responsible for the protests at an E-On owned plant in Nottinghamshire at the end of October, in which University of Manchester students participated. A widespread consensus has emerged that government concern for cutting greenhouse gas emissions is limited, and that environmental politics must be upheld by other methods.

Student protest is a key factor in the climate change protest movement. At a time when national politicians take such a disinterested and pathetic stance on the environment, activists have a responsibility to ensure protest movements due not lose sight of the grave threat post by reckless pollution. But such protest must be relevant, and acknowledging the shortcoming of overly-ambitious green proposals must be at the core of action on climate change.

The political community has once again failed to grasp the seriousness of the situation. At the recent Copenhagen climate change summit, the US suspended desperately needed decisions on emissions targets. The Guardian reported: “Britain’s climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, tried to put a brave face on Obama’s move, insisting it is still possible to reach a broad political agreement on carbon emssions targets, but senior Labour Mps admitted they feared the necessary momentum for a detailed agreements would be sucked from the Copenhagen event of politicians know a deal has been postponed to the next scheduled meeting in Mexico City next year.”

Political point-scoring has had the effect of crippling meaningful environmental decision-making. In particular, the US government has been intimidated by the interests of corporate America, which mounts a formidable opposition to any meaningful action on cutting emissions or weaning America off its addiction to cheap oil and high emissions.

International climate conferences are, in reality, little more than a PR stunt for the new ‘green’ America. In the run-up to the Copenhagen summit, several poor African nations threatened to walk out of the conference unless they saw meaningful promises from Obama that their own sacrifices would be met by guarantees from the US that it would take a closer look at its own environmental shortcomings.

It is, of course, welcome that the US is attempting to tackle the issue of emissions cuts seriously. The years of climate change denial that characterised George Bush’s presidency exacerbated tensions on cutting greenhouse gas emissions among the developed states, whose responsibility it is to set an agenda that is meaningful and realistic to poorer states. Without the US on board, any climate change proposals are seriously undermined simply as a result of America’s economic clout and its colossal impact on the environment in terms of emissions.

Prior to the Copenhagen summit, the Times reported that Obama intended to “wait until the final stages of the negotiations” in order to “achieve maximum political impact” through his announcements on emissions cuts. The US “was not expecting smaller countries to cut their overall emissions but it wanted to see specific commitments from them on reducing their growth in emissions.”

But political messages do precious little if they are not backed up by hard commitments. It is imperative that pressure is applied to the most industrially advanced developing states - namely China, Brazil and India - to make urgent commitments to reducing emissions. The political and economic sensitivity of such demands - given developing states’ reliance on high levels of fossil fuel consumption - must not detract from the urgent need to address the dangerous pollution trends associated with these states.

There is an important distinction between these states and those at the very bottom of the pile - the small African and Asian countries that make a much smaller impact environmentally. Whilst quality of life is undoubtedly poor in many areas of the industrial powerhouses such as China, overall economic deprivation is much more acute in smaller states that have been frozen out of global climate dialogue because they lack political clout.

If action is taken by the better-equipped industrialised members of the developing countries, the tendency for the worst-off countries to feel ’victimised’ by richer nations may well be reduced. It is true that for decades the developed world has applied breathtaking double standards on climate change. Western countries have demanded that the developing nations curtail their rate of industrialisation to an extent that would have been economically crippling had the same rules been applied to them.

But this environmental hypocrisy is not only restricted to climate change deals between states. There is a tendency in the climate change movement to set unrealistic targets for emissions cuts. This is most visible in the sustained attack on the aviation industry, with the increasing trend for cheap air travel becoming the scourge of environmentalists.

Indeed, air travel is a major polluter, accounting for a sizeable chunk of transport-based emissions of Carbon Dioxide - 10% in the US, for example. But the difficulty in reducing aviation emissions is linked to its necessity as the only means of travel for rapid inter-continental travel. While high speed rail is at last becoming a reality in many developed states, geographical and logistical realities mean it can never replace air travel as a effective transportation method across vast distances.

Countries must look at realistic measures to tackle pollution at as simple a level as possible. Congestion charging has proved that, at a local level, emissions can be reduced as people switch from cars to buses or trains. In Manchester, proposals to take cars off Oxford Road would relieve congestion and enable increased public transport efficiency to the main student areas. International climate change proposals must deal with the continued problems of domestic pollution by the richest nations before embarking on overly-ambitious projects that could seriously destabilise the economies of the poorest states.

Future climate change proposals must take a realistic look at how emissions can be reduced domestically, and remain credible by demanding investment in alternative power sources and transportation by all states.