Peter Kellner: Climate Change a Low Priority for Most Britains

This post first appeared on my colleague Peter Kellner’s YouGov blog.

YouGov has conducted a detailed survey, for the Left Foot Forward website, on British attitudes to climate change, as world leaders prepared to go to Copenhagen for the final, crucial days of the climate change summit. Our results suggest a mounting reluctance for Britain to take tough, immediate action to help avert global warming – a trend can be reversed in the near future only if a binding agreement is reached at Copenhagen; and even then, the public will need to be persuaded that other countries will deliver on their side of the bargain.

These are the key findings:

• Climate change remains a low priority – and has not climbed the league table despite the wide media coverage of the issue in the past few weeks. Even among the 24% who say it’s a “big and urgent issue: radical steps need to be taken”, only 45% say is among the top issues facing the country, and 36% say is among the top issues facing them personally.
• The number thinking it’s a big issue needing radical measures has fallen in the past four years from 38% to 24%.
• Scepticism about the willingness of Russia, China and India to implement any deal, already high four years ago, is even higher now: only 17% think they would implement any agreed measures.
• In contrast, faith in the US is up, though still not high: four years ago (i.e. during the Bush presidency) 24% thought they would implement agreed measures. Now, in the Obama era, the figure is up, but only to 34%.
• There has been a sharp drop in the number thinking Britain should take a lead in fighting global warming, from 49 to 36%. The numbers thinking that there is no point in the UK taking radical action until other countries also agree to take tough measures, is up from 45 to 56%.
• However, if there is a deal at Copenhagen, the willingness of people to accept higher motoring and flying costs goes up, from 26% (when the same qn is asked with no reference to Copenhagen) to 39%, while the  number opposed to higher costs falls from 64% to 46%. Note that Tory voters are far less willing than Lab or LD voters to paty more.
• But there IS majority support for the government to spend more on renewable energy.

In short, the public have not been sold on tough action; a deal at Copenhagen is a necessary condition for winning over the public – but a far from sufficient condition.

John Humphrys: After Copenhagen, what hope for the planet?

This blog first appeared on my colleague John Humphrys’ YouGov blog.

It is not often that senior politicians use words such as ‘chaos’, ‘farce’ and ‘fiasco’ to describe negotiations they have been involved with, especially when those negotiations concern matters of vital importance. Usually they dress up the weakest of agreements in the clothing of achievement and triumph, saying that because of their own brilliance and far-sightedness the world will now be a safer and happier place.

But not this time. The outcome of the Copenhagen climate change summit is so much more dismal than even the more pessimistic pundits predicted that almost no one is trying to pretend otherwise. But does this mean that the initial hopes were always far too unrealistic? And is there any hope that a more effective deal may still be struck?

The UN-run Copenhagen conference was set up as the successor to the Kyoto treaty on climate change signed in 1997. Kyoto was an attempt to get international agreement to curb the rise in the earth’s temperature as a result of the increasing volumes of man-made gases accumulating in the atmosphere as a consequence of industrialisation. An almost universal scientific consensus argues that man-made emissions threaten to raise the temperature to a point that will cause untold damage to the human occupation of the planet by the end of this century.

Copenhagen, it was hoped, would be different from Kyoto in two particular ways. First of all, it was hoped that an agreement would be made which the United States, the world’s biggest economy and up to now the main contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, could sign up to, as it had not done with Kyoto. And secondly, the new deal would include curbs on developing nations (as Kyoto had not), especially the fastest-growing developing countries such as India and China, now itself the greatest producer of emissions.

The goal was, in simple terms, a legally-binding treaty which would set a limit of a rise in temperature of 2 degrees Celsius (the maximum thought compatible with holding off disaster). It would also impose a limit on emissions consistent with such a target and provide funding by the rich, developed countries for poorer, developing countries to compensate them for the constraints such targets would place on them in the ways they could try to grow their way out of poverty.

But almost none of this came about. Hopes for a legally-binding treaty were dead before the conference even began. And at the close the formal UN conference actually agreed on nothing at all – it merely ‘noted’ an ‘accord’ agreed between five countries, the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa. That accord simply acknowledged the validity of the 2 deg target, agreed on the need for emission cuts to meet it (without spelling out what they should be or how they should be imposed), and called on developed countries to fund the payment of $10bn a year from 2012 rising to $100bn a year in 2020 to developing countries. But quite who was going to provide that funding was left unclear.

President Obama called the accord an ‘important breakthrough’, but even he acknowledged that far more still needed to be done and few other leaders have even tried to claim that degree of success.

Since the failure of the conference, blame has been flying in all directions. Nnimmo Bassey, chair of Friends of the Earth International, said: “Instead of committing to deep cuts in emissions and putting new public money on the table to help solve the climate crisis, rich countries have bullied developing nations to accept far less. Those most responsible for putting the planet in this mess have not shown the guts required to fix it and have instead acted to protect short-term political interests. ”Muhammed Chowdhury, a negotiator for the G77 group of 132 developing states, said: “The hopes of millions of people from Fiji to Grenada, Bangladesh to Barbados, Sudan to Somalia have been buried.”

Nearer home, the energy and climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, accused China, Sudan and several left-wing Latin American countries, of trying to ‘hold the world to ransom’ by preventing a deal being reached. He said the way the UN conference had been run was a ‘chaotic process dogged by procedural games’ and that reform of the UN system was needed if progress was ever to be made. Gordon Brown said: “Never again should we face the deadlock that threatened to pull down [the] talks. Never again should we let a global deal to move towards a greener future be held to ransom by only a handful of countries.”

So what chance is there now of any future deal? A successor meeting to Copenhagen is already scheduled for Mexico City in December 2010, but it seems unlikely that reform of UN procedures will have been agreed by then, let alone sufficient coming together on the substantive issues.

Some people argue that it was always beyond the scope of diplomacy to reach the sort of global deal needed. Nation states, they argue, always look after their own interests first, and those are always interpreted in a short-term way, perhaps especially so among democracies where political leaders face elections in which short-term pain is likely to loom larger than long-term gain.

Such critics have argued that the whole Kyoto/Copenhagen approach is the wrong one to follow. Instead of trying cut emissions, they say, we should instead by concentrating our efforts on mitigating the effects of a climate change we cannot do much to prevent. Such an approach would be more effective, less expensive and allow for the genuine uncertainties that exist about the speed of climate change and the precise consequences it will bring in its wake, they claim.

But supporters of the emission-cutting approach say that that is just a cop-out put forward by people who would rather not face up to the danger that is staring us in the face. Prevention, they say, is always better than damage-limitation, so we have to keep trying to cut emissions.

But the failure of Copenhagen has raised real doubts in the minds even of those who believe the world does need to cut its greenhouse gas emissions as to whether a UN-based attempt to reach a global agreement can work. Some of them are beginning to put their faith instead in the two biggest polluters, the US and China, doing a deal between themselves to curb emissions which, after all, they both recognise will harm them too. The trouble with that, though, is that the rest of the world will have to go along with what the big boys agree and that may end up being not too much to everyone else’s liking.

What’s your view? Are you disappointed by the result of Copenhagen or is its failure what you expected? Who do you think was to blame for the failure? How much faith do you put in the accord agreed between the US, China, India, Brazil and South Africa? Do you think there is any future for a UN-based attempt to halt global warming? Could a bilateral deal between the US and China offer any hope? What do you make of the argument that we should be concentrating less on trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and more on trying to mitigate the effects of global warming? And ultimately do you think it will be possible for the human race to find a way to prevent global warming becoming a real threat to human life on the planet, or do you think it is beyond us?

Let us know what you think.

64% will not give up meat to save the planet

A YouGov poll for Channel 4 News has found that 64% of British people are not willing to change their behaviour by abstaining from meat in the fight against global warming.

That 64% may understate the true figure: past experience shows that when people are asked to predict their own behaviour, some tend to bias their response towards the more virtuous answers. So we asked respondents what they expected “people you know well” to do. This can be a better predictor of future behaviour; and fully 81% expect their friends to carry on eating meat as normal.

66% said they thought that people they know well will not change their behaviour and continue to take foreign holidays by plane as they always have done.

It seems that the important battle may not be on the political stage at Copenhagen, but convincing ordinary people that climate change is a real threat, and the only way to tackle it is to change their behaviour radically.

Two-thirds Back Nuclear Power

A YouGov poll of more than 4,000 people, commissioned by EDF Energy, shows that two-thirds of the population now support nuclear power, up from 55% three years ago.

Energy security has slipped down the list of challenges facing the UK. The YouGov poll indicates that 59% of people named energy as a challenge facing government, compared to 72% the previous year. The respondents’ greatest concerns were the economic situation, immigration and pensions.

When asked specifically about energy, 82% said they were interested or very interested in where it would come from in future, and 90% thought the UK should be self sufficient in energy.

Body Shop goes back to the 1980s

The Body Shop has announced that it is re-launching some of the popular products it sold in the 1980s. Remember the banana collection, fuzzy peach, and ice blue products? Retro-style packaging will accompany the launch

Dewberry-scented bath and shower gel will also be resurrected, after a poll conducted by YouGov in June 2009 found that 44% of British women remember it fondly. 63% said that they also recall the personal care products provider’s anti animal testing campaign, which was launched in the same decade.

The Body Shop’s ethical credentials were questioned when it was sold to L’Oreal in 2006, for £652m.

Ethical Investment: On the Road to the Copenhagen Summit

YouGov research on behalf of National Ethical Investment Week,which runs from 8 – 14 November, has shown that nearly half (49%) of people with savings and investments would like to use their money to make a difference.

However, at present, only 8 per cent of investors hold a green and ethical investment or savings product. This low figure seems to reflect investors’ uncertainty about the degree of expert advice in the area. More than a quarter of the respondents said they would like the government to introduce rules to ensure financial advisers asked investors if they were interested in green and ethical investments. 44 per cent felt the financial services industry needed to provide clearer evidence of the green and ethical impacts of investments in order to attract more money.