17 years later, world leaders haven't moved on when it comes to the climate

Stability, growth, jobs all good - but where's the climate leadership? CC Image from London Summit on Flickr

Well, there we go. After the media circus, the protests, and a conference so exclusive that even some NGO participants were banned at the last minute, the G20 have pronounced, and it turns out that their environmental leadership is... er... down at the bottom of the document somewhere.

It's nice to believe that for one beautiful moment there was the chance to extract ourselves from the economic mess we've stumbled into, and at the same time create the foundations for the difficult but necessary tasks of addressing climate change.

Like helping China and India find a model for development which doesn't go hand in hand with rapidly rising carbon emissions, for example, or restructuring the way we ‘do business as usual' in the UK and taking advantage of our relative wealth to harness wind, wave and solar power (along with a whole heap of other clean technologies).

But it turns out that our leaders have dropped the ball completely. So instead, we get the rather anodyne statement (paragraph 28, positioned second from last, rated just more important than the decision to meet again):

28. We reaffirm our commitment to address the threat of irreversible climate change, based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, and to reach agreement at the UN Climate Change conference in Copenhagen in December 2009.

In other words, ‘we'll sort it out later'. And if any of that text sounds familiar, it's because it is. Remember the Earth summit in Rio in 1992? (I don't, I was 9). Well, there they founded the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change - the main diplomatic body which deals with the issue - with a communique which included these words:

1. The Parties should protect the climate system on the basis of equity in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities [Article 3.1 of the FCCC].

Now, it's great that everyone agrees there are ‘common but differentiated responsibilities' - but is the most substantial statement on the climate that comes out of the G20 going to be something that everyone had already agreed 17 years ago?

I mean, we managed to get the word ‘irreversible' in there, but is that one word really doing justice to 17 years of campaigning, scientific development, rising carbon dioxide levels and probably millions of articles, pronouncements, papers, books and speeches, all pointing to the conclusion that climate change is real, it ain't going away, and it's a really, really big deal?

John, our director, summed it up in his comment like this:

"Tacking climate change on to the end of the communique as an after thought does not demonstrate anything like the seriousness we needed to see. Hundreds of billions were found for the IMF and World Bank, but for making the transition to a green economy there is no money on the table, just vague aspirations, talks about talks and agreements to agree."

So, there are some vague mumblings about "[building] an inclusive, green, and sustainable recovery and [accelerating] the transition to a green economy" as well as a few mentions of "sustainable economic activity," whatever that means. Encouraging people to buy flip-flops made out of old car tyres probably, given the lack of ambition on display here.

The world leaders do go as far as to say: "We will make the transition towards clean, innovative, resource efficient, low carbon technologies and infrastructure." But it's painfully vague - and painfully obvious stuff. You're left thinking: Where's the leadership? Where's the big vision?

Faced with such a sidestepping of responsibility, what are we going to do now?