Another high level global conference and another list of innocuous plans and goals.

Fiddling whilst the plant burns seems to be infectious. With the global economy collapsing around their ears policymakers have never had a better opportunity to declare a move to a quota based system of fossil fuel extraction.

With oil prices at 5 year lows, down $115 from the highs earlier in the year, I am sure that producers would be willing to sit down and listen.

Whilst global demand is down there is an opportunity to slow emissions at source by setting a target as per the Sustento Framework and making it stick. All the talk of the last few years has been about increasing demand for fossil fuels and the impossibility of reigning that in.

Well right now any demand would be welcome. There has never been a better time to lay it on the line. It’s time to stop pissing around with talk fests and policies which will never actually reduce emissions in any meaningful way.

Set a target for global annual fossil fuel extraction and then stick to it.

It’s taken a bit of time but someone decided to publish my climate change proposal. After being rejected by the Journal Of Climate Change for being too grand, the Environmentalist, the publication of the Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment in the UK, published an amended version last month.

You can read it here if you haven’t read the old version.

The key theme is that we must control what we take out of the earth rather trying to control emissions after use. It also stresses the need for a global carbon budget.

Nothing has happened in recent years to change my thoughts on it. It is a large canvas with many themes to explore. If anyone wants to take on some of those themes in a new piece of research just let me know.

Global leaders are shaping up for talks on a binding reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions. The EU Environment Commissioner is the in US for talks on this very subject. The US say they are ready to move forward on this thorny issue but want all countries to make similar reductions. This is not music to the ears of the Chinese who will continue to trumpet the issue of per capita emissions as opposed to total emissions.

No doubt they will all keep knocking this ball around until someone caves in. But why bother? It’s simply the wrong approach. At the moment we have a free energy market (actually its dysfunctional but that’s another story) where people can choose to buy what is offered. If we want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions we simply need to reduce the amount of fossil fuels available to create them.

Then just leave the market to operate as normal. Simple.

I know I’m restating my position on this but the longer this goes on the more clear it becomes

So finally the US capitulates and agrees to be part of talks in 2 years time that will look to make deep cuts in global emissions. Yet the reality, as reported here, is that not much has changed. The US still won’t budge on developing nations (read China and India) and still won’t provide any meaningful targets. It’s interesting that without Australia alongside they are looking very much alone on this issue.

Arguing over who is responsible and who must cut what is really a waste of time. It’s not an argument that can be won by either side. The simple question to be asked is whether global emission levels need to be reduced. If so then they need to be reduced through a global mechanism such as I have proposed in Climate Control where emissions will be reduced by virtue of a quota agreed at the point of extraction not use.

Otherwise we might as well stop wasting our time and focus on adapting and developing cheaper supplies of energy.

Martin Wolf writes an insightful piece here in the FT. If you can’t access it just register as its free.

He points to ingrained problems which are holding back progress:

- The free rider problem.

- Richer countries are responsible yet want poor countries to stop developing.

- The reality that the poorer countries will be worst hit by any further warming.

On top of that we still have disagreements of whether warming is taking place to the degree alluded to in the forecasting models. Scrutiny of forecasting processes and data management is throwing up some issues. Who can we trust? We know politicians always have their own agenda and a huge amount of political capital has been invested in the whole process.

Richer countries may feel that their best course of action is to simply adapt via new environmental technologies, building and planning. Developing countries (China and India) may feel that they didn’t cause this and so can carry on growing at a furious pace.

Poor countries simply have to bear it.

As Wolf notes we may need a real wake up call to make anything actually happen. He muses on the potential of a 2o degree increase as having the desired effect. We saw this scenario play out in the “The Day After Tomorrow” where the world gets a big wake up call but pulls through in the end.

For now though it seems like we will just stumble along from one conference to the next increasing emissions but having little real impact.

Today the IPCC released its synthesis report bringing together the work of the past few years. It’s clearly worse than expected suggesting that at current levels warming could be up to 6 degrees by 2030 which is above the 1-4 degrees by 2100 as previously predicted.

As reported it paints a grimmer picture using recent data and stresses the need for immediate action. Coming just before the Bali Conference on 4th December it’s a clear statement as to the direction the UN will be looking to take.

At the same time there are those who continue to decry these types of reports as another installment of fiction along the lines of the Da Vinci code.

So where are we left?

The costs of inaction are difficult to summarise regardless of serious estimation like the Stern Report. After all economics is hardly a science well known for its predictive ability.

Ignoring those who say climate change and global warming are a sham (and they should always be part of the debate), what is the best way to approach this?

Adaptation or restraint? How about Both/And? Why does it have to be one or the other. We need to keep refining our energy systems and the one we have now is incredibly inefficient, controlled by cosy cartels and unreliable nation states.

Climate change provides an opportunity to address the environmental impacts off our consumption processes as well as the way in which we access and generate energy.

Why argue the toss? Just do both and somewhere the right equilibrium will be achieved.