Napoleon’s lesson for the climate change battle

Politicians congratulating themselves on ambitious climate change targets that were agreed at an EU summit meeting this month might do well to remember Napoleon.

"Public opinion is a mysterious and invisible power, to which everything must yield," said the French emperor 200 years ago. He added a warning: "There is nothing more fickle, more vague, or more powerful."

For some time now European public opinion has appeared to be supportive of policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and increase the use of renewable energies.

A series of Eurobarometer opinion surveys have shown widespread support for environmental action in Europe. A Eurobarometer devoted to climate change published on 5 March found that 83% of respondents wanted renewable energy targets set at EU level and 76% agreed they would have to change their energy consumption habits over the next ten years.

But as politicians commit themselves to further high-profile climate change action, they run the risk of a "fickle" and "powerful" public reaction.

A glance at the history of the climate change debate offers some signs that public support for environmental action is not unshakeable.

Only 30 years ago the idea that burning fossil fuels could affect the weather was restricted to conspiracy theorists and a few specialist scientists.

Throughout the 1980s, research linking carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to a possible increase in global temperatures mounted up in scientific reports from Washington to Moscow.

In 1988 the UN environment programme (UNEP) agreed that this evidence should be assessed by a team of experts, ahead of an international ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio de Janeiro. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed to make the assessment. Governments in Rio four years later agreed a Climate Change Convention, the treaty behind today’s Kyoto Protocol.

‘Global warming’ entered everyday speech. Newspapers and television channels reported successive IPCC conclusions that man-made CO2 emissions were indeed pushing average temperatures up, and subsequent environmental group threats of catastrophe if emissions continued to rise.

For years EU politicians have backed climate change policies, including the Kyoto Protocol itself in 1997 and the CO2 emissions trading scheme six years later.

But it was the combination of the president of Russia and a British economist - with help from some unusual weather patterns - that put energy concerns and climate change on every front page.

President Vladimir Putin’s decision to cut gas supplies to Ukraine in December 2005 increased fears that EU energy supplies from Russia were vulnerable. It gave impetus to European Commission attempts to develop a common approach to security of energy supply. Three months later the Commission started talks on an EU strategy that would reduce both energy imports and CO2 emissions, replacing a chunk of oil and gas consumption with domestic renewable power.

In October last year, a report funded by the British government painted one of the starkest warnings yet of possible climate change effects. Economist Nicholas Stern in his ‘Review on the economics of climate change’ warned that, unless action was taken immediately, climate change could shrink the global economy by 20%. It was taken up across Europe, much in the same way that, over in the US, public opinion latched on to the Al Gore documentary, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.

Measures to combat climate change became essential political currency. Proposals to cut transport emissions or promote eco-efficient light bulbs increased in value - the stuff to win elections and burnish reputations.

The European Commission rode the waves. Stavros Dimas, the environment commissioner joined 50 economists in claiming last November that the Stern Report showed the need for a stronger CO2 emission trading scheme. Commission President José Manuel Barroso championed climate change as a cause to which European citizens would rally. Even Günter Verheugen, accused of sabotaging every environmental proposal dreamt up in Brussels since he was made enterprise commissioner in 2004, put forward a ten-point plan to tackle climate change.

But even as politicians were welcoming the Stern Report, the public was being given reasons to doubt it. Bjørn Lomborg, a Danish political science professor and author of ‘The Sceptical Environ-mentalist’ - a 2001 book challenging the belief that the environment is getting irredeemably worse - was among the first to rubbish Stern’s economics. According to Lomborg, Stern varies the cost estimate of climate change problems at various points in his review, and "cherry-picks" statistics to suit his arguments. Lomborg said that the review was based on "an unrealistically pessimistic view of the 22nd century".

Criticism of Stern was greatest in the UK. BBC Radio ran a critique of the report in January along the same lines as Lomborg, with a team of climate scientists and environmental economists arguing that Stern had got it wrong. One professor said he would have failed Stern’s work if it was handed in as a Masters thesis.

Channel 4, another UK broadcaster, this month went further, with a TV programme entitled ‘The great global warming swindle’ in which a group of scientists argued that global warming is not, after all, the result of CO2 emissions from human activity.

Lomborg does not go that far. Appearing with Gore before Congress last week he argued that climate change was real and man-made, but the doomsday scenarios were exaggerated.

Climate change sceptics have always existed, but in Europe they have not recently enjoyed widespread support. But criticism is likely to become more common as climate change policies become an everyday reality. Partly this risk of a backlash is down to the healthy human instinct to question widely held beliefs. Partly it stems from the media’s hunger to change the story. But there is also public fear that climate change measures might start to make life more difficult.

Lomborg argues that what is required are smart solutions not "excessive if well-intentioned efforts".

When people are asked to replace their old light bulbs with (initially) more expensive energy-saving brands, they will start asking for absolute proof that the climate change arguments are watertight. Taxes on travel are unlikely to be popular.

The Commission last May launched a programme called ‘You Control Climate Change’, an EU-wide public information campaign encouraging Europeans to reduce CO2 emissions by changing their everyday habits. But less than a year later, Barroso is warning that EU politicians will lose the climate change argument if they try to force changes in individual behaviour.

Measures to limit the availability of cheap flights, or set personal carbon trading allowances, were counter-productive and would "turn people against the cause", he suggested.

For the moment, the fight against climate change has public support, but it does not follow that the public will not change sides. Napoleon went on to remark about public opinion: "Capricious as it is, it is nevertheless much more often true, reasonable, and just, than we imagine."

Politicians congratulating themselves on ambitious climate change targets that were agreed at an EU summit meeting this month might do well to remember Napoleon.