Dialogue: Green credibility took a pasting

When you hear talk of saving the planet from now on, count your spoons. Hardly anybody seriously uses a phrase like "saving the planet" out loud - it sounds too grand and silly. But some people write it on posters and protest placards and, lately, in newspapers lamenting the collapse of climate change talks at The Hague.

The casualty of that collapse was not the planet so much as the credibility of those who claim to be most concerned about it.

There has always been a suspicion about the more fervent Greens that when it came to the crunch the environment would turn out to be less important than their real agenda. It came to the crunch at The Hague.

There, in the name of the United Nations, environment ministers of member countries spent two weeks arguing about how to arrest the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that seems to be causing a global warming.

Factory and vehicle emissions are thought to be causing the increase and obviously there are two ways the increase might be tackled. Governments could try to stop the growth of fossil-fuelled industry and traffic. Or they can try to see that trees are planted to soak up any further emissions.

Moreover, they might maintain a global balance by agreeing to a system of internationally tradeable emission rights and credits for plantations that absorb COinf2.

One of the alternatives would carry severe costs of change - to industry, jobs and living standards. That is the one that excites Greens.

Well, let's be fair. There are Greens like Guy Salmon, Simon Upton and the editors of the Economist who are equally excited by the ability of property rights and regulated markets to produce environmental benefits along with growing prosperity.

But the Greens who infest European politics and hold the balance of power in our Parliament are a different breed. They are ageing products of the 1970s who have never outgrown the attitudes of that time.

They were allowed to stage funny little demonstrations within the proceedings at The Hague. At one point they thrust a cream pie in the face of the American envoy. They are such wags.

They have more or less made the running on global warming since the first "earth summit" at Rio de Janeiro in 1992, which produced air-headed aims to to cut greenhouse emissions to 1990 levels by the end of the decade. Within five years, at another earth summit, in New York, it was clear that no country was going to meet the target. So Europe's environment ministers pressed for an even less likely one: 15 per cent below 1990 levels by 2010.

Near the end of 1997, at Kyoto, the United States offered reductions to 1990 levels by 2010. But the eight-year American boom has put that, too, way beyond reach.

When the UN summoned ministers to The Hague last month to work out what to do next, reasonable people might have expected the environmentalist to be losing faith in emission-reduction targets and ready to try the carbon sinks and tradeable emissions. After all, greenhouse gas doesn't observe national boundaries. The global effect mattered more than acts of national self-denial, didn't it? No, it turned out.

Even once it became plain that the US would not agree to ignore its vast plantations in any calculation of greenhouse guilt ... Even when, near the end, the British got the US to agree to put only a fraction of its forestry and crops into the calculation, and to forego credit for carbon-sink investment in other countries ...

When the British put the deal to their European partners, they would not hear of it. They wanted national acts of self-denial or nothing. We got nothing.

To groups such as Friends of the Earth, and even to the environment reporters of reputable newspapers, carbon credits and tradeable emissions were "loopholes" that permitted "cheating" to avoid "moral" obligations. Something is going on in those minds that is not mainly interested in the mundane task of devising ways to maintain elements of the natural environment.

People who use words like "moral" for an essentially scientific and technical task are heading into quasi-religious territory. For them, the environment is about perfecting our lives, forcing us to embrace a set of values and a lifestyle that they believe to be more nourishing to the human spirit. Well, they can have their lifestyle. I rather like the fruits of the funky, competitive material world and I suspect it can bring even better lives for many more people yet.

Obviously, we should maintain an atmospheric balance as we use up the still vast reserves of fossil fuels, but let's keep it in perspective. It is only a precaution.

Already the experts, the UN's intergovernmental panel on climate change, have had to scale down their premonitions of disaster. In next year's report they will have to postpone the melting ice caps, rising sea levels and Pacific atolls disappearing beneath the waves for another few hundred years.

A study of 25 years of data collected by the National Tidal Facility of Flinders University, South Australia, has failed to confirm the increase in sea level predicted by climate models. The director, Dr Wolfgang Scherer, said last month: "There is no acceleration in sea-level rise - none that we can discern at all."

He said his findings were in line with other studies around the world and the results would be reflected in the latest IPCC assessment, to be issued next year. Some of the assumptions that underpinned the global warming hypothesis would have to be reviewed. Again.