The seeds of the transition town idea lie in the small Irish town of Kinsale, where in 2005 a group of students at the local further education college developed a process for residents to draw up an ‘energy descent action plan’ – a tool to design a positive timetabled way through the huge changes that will occur as world oil production peaks. The action plan covers a number of areas of life in Kinsale, including food, energy, tourism, education and health.

For example, for food, the plan envisions that by 2021 the town will have made the transition from dependency to self-reliance, where ‘all landscaping in the town comprises of edible plants, fruit trees line the streets, all parks and greens have become food forests and community gardens’. As a practical step towards this, the plan recommends the immediate appointment of a local food officer.

For housing, the plan envisions that by 2021 ‘all new buildings in Kinsale will include such things as a high level of energy efficiency together with a high portion of local sustainable materials’. A suggested immediate practical step towards this is a review of current building practices and future development plans.

The energy descent action plan approach landed in the UK when a Kinsale college tutor, Rob Hopkins, moved to Totnes and held a number of talks and film screenings to introduce the idea. In September 2006 Transition Town Totnes was launched, seeking ‘to engage all sectors of the community in addressing this, the great transition of our time’ and seeking to put ‘Totnes on the international map as a community that engaged its creativity and collective genius with this timely and pressing issue’. The initiative has spread beyond Totnes just one year on; towns and villages around the UK have started developing a transition town approach for themselves (see box).

One reason why the initiative has caught people’s imaginations is that, at its core, is a hopeful message. Many ‘transitioners’ are motivated to change energy use patterns not just because of energy shortages in the future but because of self-imposed energy rationing now – because cutting fossil fuel use is essential if climate change is to be lessened.

The transition movement shakes off the usual gloom and limitation around this message by calling for positive and pro-active changes. These are based in how the world actually is, rather than how we would like it to be if only someone, somewhere, would come up with that miraculous solution that will allow us to expand infinitely and indefinitely, all within a finite world. Rather than a vision of deferred promise and baseless hope it offers community-wide participation to find realistic and workable answers.

Whether the transition town approach can work at a citywide level, or whether its call for reduced consumption will have a wider impact on, for example, international trading systems and their inherently heavy use of fossil fuels, remains to be seen. In Totnes, at least, the creation of new businesses and land use initiatives suggests that the transitioners are in it for the long haul.

These problems have not gone unrecognised: the 11th Five Year Plan, covering 2006 to 2010, includes plans to reduce emissions and develop energy-saving practices on the domestic front. China is also aiming to construct a world-first – an entire eco-city, mostly powered by renewable energy and as close to carbon neutral as possible. Unfortunately, in a not so eco-friendly way, the city will be built in the mouth of the Yangtse river, on land that currently provides a home to thousands of rare birds, plants and other species.

In terms of the supply of energy, China’s grandly titled National Plan for Medium and Long Term Scientific and Technological Development prioritises the development of renewable energy sources. And next year a law will come into force aimed at sourcing one-tenth of energy from renewables by 2020. China’s size means that the significance of this commitment lies as much beyond, as within, national borders. Li Junfeng, secretary general of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industry Association, points out that: ‘China’s anticipated entry into the global renewable energy market is expected to have a profound impact on the global industry.’

More ambitious plans are afoot for another component in China’s energy mix – coal. Even though coal is a polluting fossil fuel, China has huge reserves and relies on it for approximately three quarters of its power generation. So it is unlikely to give it up any time soon. Instead, the Chinese are looking to two technological steps to get out of their pollution pickle: producing less general pollution by burning ‘cleaner’ coal, and releasing fewer greenhouse gas emissions by capturing carbon emissions from coal-burning plants and storing them underground. The EU is working on these plans with China, while the UK is funding a £3.5 million feasibility study for a near zero emissions coal generation project.

While a focus on using – but ‘improving’ – coal is part of securing China’s energy supply, these measures are yet to cut the mustard when it comes to the pollution side of things. The effectiveness of carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is still not known. Meanwhile, China’s State Environment Protection Administration has closed polluting factories only to see them re-open weeks later, possibly with local authorities turning a blind eye. China’s local authorities need to have energy generated in their region, not least because they need the taxes from the industries that rely on the energy. Despite good intentions by national policy-makers, the pressure and demand for energy may well mean that standard coal and polluting production methods get used anyway.

The unique opportunity that China does have, and that other countries need to support, is the chance to pursue its inevitable development in a way that actively seeks out the world’s most environmentally conscious options. This includes a stronger focus on energy efficiency and renewable power – not including nuclear power, which, as is the case around the world, is being promoted as an environmental measure. Rixin Kang of the China National Nuclear Corporation has said that: ‘To meet the need of energy supply and environmental protection, nuclear power will play a more active role in China.’

With that traditional indicator of increasing consumer aspirations, car ownership, growing at 60 to 80 per cent a year, it remains to be seen whether the tension between environmental protection and the demand for western consumer lifestyles can be resolved. Stronger campaigns in already industrialised countries, which show that we too are committed to re-thinking resource use, and which highlight how western patterns of consumption are destructive (as opposed to ‘modern’) could support Chinese grassroots movements aiming for a sustainable core to the country’s development.

China knows that it has serious environmental problems – yet is also focused on growth. How this conflict is resolved is still up for grabs: China’s development does not have to be a carbon copy of the west.

But while such announcements typically dominate the industrialised world’s strategies on climate change, occasionally ideas come forward that belong in the bucket of beneficial action. A consultation on microgeneration launched by the UK government back in June still has the potential to be placed in the latter.

Microgeneration, or micropower, is the generation of low-carbon heat and power by individuals, small businesses and communities to meet our own energy needs. It is a world away from the inefficient and polluting traditional energy systems that see large power stations located far from the point of use, and represents the kind of step-change in thinking that is badly needed to transform one of the root causes of climate change. Amory Lovins, of the environmental organisation, Rocky Mountain Institute, describes a shift from mega to micropower as a breakthrough comparable to “the leap from the steam engine to the diesel locomotive”.

Micropower is by no means new. It includes devices such as solar panels and small wind turbines that have been promoted for years now as alternative sources of energy, alongside more recent domestic innovations such as heat pumps that extract energy from the ground to run central heating, and combined heat and power (CHP) systems that convert heat given off by a gas boiler into electricity. What is new, however, is the potential for micropower to move out of the alternative scene and be taken up on a wider, societal level, thus making a noticeable impact on energy policy.

The environmental charity, the Green Alliance, has calculated that if, between now and 2020, just a quarter of the million-plus gas boilers removed in the UK annually were replaced with micro-CHP systems, this alone would deliver half of the domestic sector carbon reductions set out in the government’s energy white paper. The New Economics Foundation, meanwhile, has determined that if half of the replacement boilers were micro-CHP they would produce the equivalent electricity of a new power station each year, removing the need for additional large-scale power plants – as well as undermining any revival of the nuclear industry.

With limited resources available for energy developments, the supporters of micropower are pushing hard for it to be taken seriously. Alan Whitehead MP, sponsor of a Private Members Bill on microgeneration put before parliament in June, says: “We know that it will cost at least £10 billion just to replace nuclear power stations going out of commission over the next 15 years, that the money will need to be on the table for 10 years before any electricity is produced, and that most of it will have to come from the public purse. So a good question to ask is: what other power generation can be purchased for this sum, and how quickly would it work? The answer, a comprehensive microgeneration programme, is both quick to produce power and safe to install.”

Guy Thompson of the Green Alliance has pointed out that, despite microgeneration bringing energy issues closer to home practically and offering an excellent opportunity for the public engagement so desperately needed to tackle climate change, the consultation includes no specific measures to stimulate consumer demand. This is a pity: community-wide microgeneration could be a key local protection against the national energy crises that are inevitable in the coming decades.

The consultation also lacks any targets, which Ron Bailey of the Sustainable Energy Partnership argues are essential. “These are what will drive policies to stimulate demand and help us to measure reductions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas,” he says. Bailey believes that without targets the government’s draft microgeneration strategy “will not be a serious strategy to deal with current environmental problems”.

The consultation on microgeneration is open until 23 September. With a final strategy not due until April next year, it remains to be seen whether the government chooses to dig out the contents of the bucket of beneficence or to toss a great opportunity in the direction of the dustbin of distractions.

The other top issue on the G8 agenda, poverty in Africa, is a conundrum with no hope of resolution without a relatively stable climate. The cost of environmental degradation in Ghana is estimated to be 2 per cent of national income. Africa’s dependence on ecosystems under severe pressure from unpredictable weather means that by 2080 the continent may be home to up to 80 per cent of those people who will be at risk from hunger. Despite a compelling combination of concern and need, effective G8 action on climate change is about as likely as a pre-Christmas turkey dash to the slaughterhouse. The forecast for the G8 summit is looking bleak.

One of the fundamental obstacles to G8 engagement with climate change is that all of these industrialised countries are reliant on that key driver of climate change: oil. The G8 produce around 47 per cent of all global carbon dioxide emissions and are home to most of the world’s top 20 oil companies. Russia, which has the biggest oil reserves of all the G8 countries, would struggle without its fossil fuel exports. At the World Bank, another forum dominated by members of the G8, support for fossil fuel projects amounts to around 94 per cent of the energy portfolio while support for renewables is around just 6 per cent.

Reliant on fossil fuels and so reluctant to engage in the shift in energy sources that climate change demands, the G8 countries are investing in the other end of things: capture of the greenhouse gases emitted when these fuels are used. G8 members are supportive of the idea of storing carbon dioxide both above and below ground to prevent it being released into the atmosphere and are pledging to invest in Carbon Capture and Storage technology.

Underground burial involves great stashes under land or sea, with no guarantee against leaks at a future date. Those G8 countries involved in the Kyoto process have expressed support for overground capture in the form of “carbon sinks”, through planting trees or the conservation of forests. While trees do soak up carbon dioxide, methods of accounting for just how much a tree can store are far more complex. Forests and tree plantations are subject to unpredictable influences, including fires, pests, diseases and the availability of nutrients. Temperature change from global warming is a fairly predictable factor but the changes this will bring in trees’ behaviour are not. And human behaviour, fortunately, can be equally unpredictable.

While in Scotland, one project the G8 may wish to reflect on is a carbon sink in Espirito Santo, Brazil. It is funded by BP to make up for carbon dioxide emitted in the company’s operations at Grangemouth (Scotland’s major oil refinery on the River Forth) and across the globe. However, the people of Espirito Santo are not so keen on their role as passive components in an accounting system in which over-consumption by rich countries is the bottom line. This May, indigenous people in the area reclaimed 11,000 hectares of land, including eucalyptus plantations, for restoration to native forest and construction of new villages.

The reclaimers point out that monoculture eucalyptus plantations are an environmental pest, not an environmental solution. The plantations allow for pesticide run-off and poisoning, consume vast amounts of water resources, devastate local agriculture and support little biodiversity. Heidi Bachram of Carbon Trade Watch has suggested that such carbon sink plantations act “as an occupying force in impoverished rural communities dependent on these lands for survival”.

In terms of the issues to be addressed at the G8 meeting, indigenous participants at a 2003 Forest Peoples Programme workshop in India released a declaration stating that “the carbon credit approach (to climate change) may trigger a new wave of debt mechanism and inequity on the South. The more carbon a person or company in a Northern country emits, the more land it will be entitled to grab in the South for its carbon emissions”.

The trend of richer countries taking resources from poorer countries, while keeping those countries poor through the system of international debt, is likely to be made worse by the G8′s approach to climate change. Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation, has described climate change itself as an issue of debt – of ecological debt, rather than cash debt. In a recent book, Ecological Debt: The Health of the Planet and the Wealth of Nations, he describes how the G8 countries are using up environmental resources and running up ecological debts. This process, Simms claims, is a bigger threat to global poverty eradication than the foreign debts of poor countries.

Alongside carbon storage, nuclear power is another technology likely to be boosted by the G8 summit. Although a draft G8 climate change communiqué leaked prior to the summit did not indicate a position on nuclear power, both Bush and Blair are known to be keen on this outdated energy source, despite the long term problems it creates.

The tragedy of all this is that tackling climate change is not impossible. Far from it. In a report for the International Climate Change Task Force this year, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) reminded readers that, according to the G8 Renewables Energy Task Force itself, the barriers to the deployment of renewable energy are financial and political, rather than technological.

The IPPR report outlined steps that could be taken to de-carbonise the global economy, reconcile climate policy with trade and competitiveness, and make climate policy contribute to poverty eradication. Aimed at a forum bringing together government, business and top scientists and co-chaired by former transport secretary Stephen Byers, the report was framed in language that G8 policy-makers could understand.

Elsewhere, commentators on both left and right have suggested that, alongside reduced energy consumption, a wholesale re-think of energy systems – such as a shift from large and remote megapower energy developments to micropower systems sited close to the point of use – is both needed and possible.

But little will happen at Gleneagles this month in terms of climate change. The US refuses to sign up to a timeline for emission cuts – a basic first step to slow climate change. Other G8 members may resist further emission cuts from fear of being out-competed by US companies with limited restraints on energy use.

Meanwhile, the G8 summit takes place at a time that may be the endgame for life on Earth. Global temperature change, species extinction and upheaval in biodiversity are taking place on a scale never seen before in human history. Despite all this, the G8 leaders are likely to congratulate themselves just on getting agreement that yes, something possibly serious really is going on out there.

The environmental excuse is that nuclear power stations produce less greenhouse gas emissions than fossil fuel-powered stations, making them the best option for filling the gap between the winding down of fossil fuels and the revving up of renewables. This argument was given a boost in Channel 4′s War on Terra series in January, when Marcel Theroux checked out whether nuclear power was the answer to averting environmental catastrophe. His most choice interviewee was environmental thinker James Lovelock, who argued forcefully and passionately that nuclear power, despite its risks and costs, is a better option than carrying on with fossil fuels and the inevitably ensuing climate catastrophe. A few weeks after the programme, a poll on the environment section of Channel 4′s website showed 67 per cent in favour of the question “should we adopt nuclear power as our main source of energy?” and 33 per cent against.

While the programme’s argument was convincing (and almost convinced at least one peace campaigner with whom I”ve spoken since), its approach is akin to accepting detention without trial and an end to jury trials as useful steps in tackling terrorism: it takes a symptom in isolation without addressing the actual problem, and leads to a world that isn”t necessarily a better place in which to live.

There should be no argument that the end of the fossil fuel age is nigh. Nuclear power, however, is not a logical next step. It is still an unsafe and environmentally destructive technology. According to Greenpeace – environmentalists who have, thankfully, maintained their opposition to nuclear power – the production, transport, storage and reprocessing of highly radioactive nuclear materials causes long-term dangers to human health, the environment, and global security. And when the fossil fuels needed to build uranium mines, reactors and waste storage facilities are considered; alongside the resources used in transporting materials within the full nuclear cycle and decommissioning reactors, greenhouse gas emissions from nuclear power are far from nil.

Under pressure from the US (oh yes), Tony Blair claims he has -fought long and hard & to make sure that the nuclear option is not closed off”. The possibility of a fresh round of nuclear stations has been kept open at his personal insistence. Even if the Tories formed the next government, their position is unlikely to be different: a December article on the Corporate Watch website recounted how research into renewable energy programmes which promised abundant and cheap energy from wave and tidal power was scrapped by the Conservative government in the eighties, when the projects began to threaten investment in the nuclear sector.

As George Monbiot has pointed out, the government will not spend twice on alternatives to fossil fuels: it will either invest massively in nuclear generation or invest massively in energy-saving and alternative power. The nuclear option is often referred to as a final stage – an option that isn”t taken lightly but becomes inevitable. While this is a limited argument in general it is particularly inappropriate here, for there are many actions that can be taken now to reduce emissions in an effective way. Research from the Rocky Mountain Institute, for example, has shown that seven times as much carbon can be saved through electricity efficiencies as through investing in nuclear power.

At best, the nuclear option for tackling the climate crisis is a red herring. At worst, through the way in which it drains resources, undermines environmental security and illustrates our lack of imagination when it comes to dealing with a crisis, the nuclear option is an absolute tragedy.

The ETS covers heavy energy-using industries: electricity generators; oil refineries; iron, steel and minerals industries; and paper, pulp and board manufacturers. Companies are given quotas for carbon dioxide emissions; these are divvied up in accordance with National Allocation Plans submitted to the EU by the member states. The UK government has got into a slight pickle over just how many allowances it can get away with, but more on that later.

As of January, when they’re getting down and dirty with their manufacturing each company in the scheme will have to decide just how dirty they want to be, or what level of carbon dioxide they want to emit. For though each will be given a limit for emissions, the potential to trade means that this cap is not the end of the story.

Companies that emit more than their allocation will be able to buy allowances from other companies that made emission cuts. Some may decide it is cheaper to pay the fine for exceeding their allocations, rather than spending on energy efficiency or on buying allowances from elsewhere. The market will make everything work out and emissions in the European Community overall will reduce. Or so the theory goes.

Some critics of the ETS claim that a problem based in a capitalist market (too much pollution from unwise use of resources) cannot be solved by a dose from the same economic system. Principles aside, the thinking behind the set-up of this market is still half-baked.

The National Allocation Plans are collectively meant to limit the amount of carbon dioxide that gets emitted. Theoretically this leads to scarcity in the commodity, giving it a value that has to be factored into business costs, and encouraging companies to look at energy efficiency or ways to cut emissions overall. However, a proposal to include the Kyoto Protocol’s ‘flexible mechanisms’ in the scheme would leave the ETS covering an unspecified amount of emissions, bringing scarcity in the market commodity into question. Also, the industries involved in the ETS are not traditional innovators of new technologies (a role more likely to be found in small and medium-sized businesses). They are less likely to see the scheme as an opportunity for investment in more environmentally sensitive technologies and more likely to moan about a perceived inability to compete.

Small and medium businesses will likely not rush to get involved in the scheme as they are likely to lose out in the allocation of emissions allowances. Governments are likely to allocate the greatest number of allowances to larger industries, the industries that currently pollute the most.

In October the UK asked for a revision of its National Allocation Plan. According to the pressure group the Climate Action Network, the increase asked for was equivalent to an amount saved when seven other EU countries cut their own draft plans. Beckett is rapidly losing credibility as her department caves into the Department of Trade and Industry: Friends of the Earth has suggested the UK is now on track for a 14-15 per cent cut in emissions by 2010, rather than the 20 per cent that the Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs says it wants achieved. And whatever Beckett’s hopes on aviation emissions, the earliest that these could be included in the ETS is 2008. In the meantime, a continuing rise in transport emissions makes a mockery of the UK’s concern over climate change.

There are economic tools (taxation being one) that could play a role in tackling climate change. The EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme, however, is not one of them.

The pledge comes as a direct follow-up to the government’s plans to carry out the biggest single programme of aviation expansion that the UK has ever seen. The Future of Air Transport, the December 2003 aviation white paper, predicted that by 2030 figures for UK airport passengers would be three times the number that they are today. In response, the government is proposing new runways at airports that could include Stansted, Heathrow or Gatwick, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Glasgow, as well as significant expansion at other British airports.

Such a narrow ‘predict and provide’ approach to transport has a precedent in policies on road-building. However, a key difference between the mass campaigns against road expansion in the 1990s and the campaign currently building up against aviation expansion, is that the latter is attempting to show the strength of its supporter base at an early stage. A very public and very large level of opposition against Thatcher’s ‘predict and provide’ road-building programme did not really take off until the 1990s, when the direction of development was set and construction work was well on its way. Today, many of the proposed aviation schemes are right back at the starting block. George Marshall of the climate change campaign Rising Tide says: ‘We really have a chance of stopping these plans if we can show early on that the political risk for the government in pushing this issue could be huge.’

Marshall points out the impact that the pledge could have on the funding needed for airport developments to go ahead. ‘Take Stansted, where a vast amount of private money is needed for the proposed expansion,’ he says. ‘If any high street bank, for example, should consider backing this project I would like to be able to go to them and suggest that the scale of opposition, illustrated by the number of pledge signatories, creates a high level of risk for the bank, making airport expansion a very poor investment.’

Opponents to airport expansion have already scored one significant victory, for The Future of Air Transport is the first white paper ever to face a judicial review. Campaigners have been given permission to present evidence to the High Court that the document was fundamentally flawed and reached conclusions that were irrational and inconsistent with the government’s own policies and with the consultation ground rules. Such inconsistencies have been clearly spelled out by the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee. The committee’s March 2004 aviation report concluded: ‘If aviation emissions increase on the scale predicted by the Department for Transport, the UK’s 60 per cent carbon emission reduction target, which the government set last year, will become meaningless and unachievable.’

Pledge campaigners point to the many different aviation strategies that could be pursued, from developing a high-quality rail system in the UK and eliminating the need for internal flights, to ending the massive tax breaks currently enjoyed by the aviation industry. ‘The action needed to cut back on carbon emissions that accelerate climate change is completely within our reach,’ says Marshall. ‘In the case of the pledge and the campaign to oppose aviation expansion, the key to being effective lies in the numbers. It all comes down to individuals making that personal commitment and signing the pledge.’

www.airportpledge.org.uk

Both parties’ claims are, of course, unrealistic. Energy independence would mean finding different sources for more than half of the oil consumed in the US: 60 per cent of the daily total, to be exact. (Roughly a quarter of the US’s oil currently comes from the Middle East.) The natural instinct of Bush the oilman is to replace that oil with a home-grown variety of the same product, and his eagerness to drill in wilderness areas such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is no secret. That definitely would reduce the US’s reliance on imported oil: according to the US Geological Survey, oil from the refuge could replace imports from Saudi Arabia for nearly 20 years. Yet domestically sourced oil still couldn’t keep up with consumption; nor would it ease the increasing pressure on the US to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by burning less oil.

At the moment, Kerry is opposing opening up the Arctic, although he too is happy to dabble in fossil fuels. Both Republicans and Democrats are, for example, keen to extend natural gas drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and to construct a pipeline bringing natural gas from Canada and Alaska. However, both parties have recognised that alternative sources of fuel are part of the energy picture. Unfortunately, both support nuclear power as an alternative to fossil fuels, despite its pollution, safety issues and emission of carbon dioxide at various stages of its life cycle.

As far as less polluting alternatives go, Kerry aims to generate 20 per cent of the nation’s motor fuel and electricity from renewable energy sources by 2020. This is an ambitious plan, particularly as figures from the US Energy Department show that only 1.5 per cent of motor fuel currently comes from alternative sources and 6 per cent of electricity comes from renewables. Kerry aims to meet his 2020 target through a $20 billion ‘energy security and conservation trust fund’, half of which is to be used to support

US car manufacturers in developing and building more fuel-efficient vehicles. One of the much-publicised fuel-efficient vehicles on sale in the States this summer is Ford’s new Escape Hybrid sports-utility vehicle. Described by Ford as ‘a vehicle that can take you to the very places you’re helping to preserve’, its critics have termed it a ‘patch job’ from the company with the lowest fuel-economy rate of the US’s major vehicle manufacturers. A hybrid engine (part petrol-powered, part electric) is a step in the right direction – so long as the electricity used is generated from renewables rather than nuclear or fossil fuels. But Kerry’s refusal to challenge the prominence of the private motor car, and to remind US citizens of how their railroads were ripped up to make room for highways, and how the production of these machines is incredibly resource-intensive and polluting, is symbolic of wider political problems.

To have any chance of getting elected a presidential candidate needs to assure US citizens that their way of life will not be threatened. Yet that way of life relies on a globally unfair distribution of resources, including energy resources. Energy independence would involve more than tinkering with vehicle efficiency; it has implications not just for foreign policy, but for the consumption patterns that underscore the entire American dream.

The suit, filed in New York’s federal district court using a common law public-nuisance petition, alleges that the corporations it names are “the five largest emitters of carbon dioxide in the US and are among the largest in the world”. These five – the energy firms American Electric Power, Southern Company, Xcel Energy, Cinergy and the Tennessee Valley Authority – emit approximately 10 per cent of the US’s annual carbon dioxide emissions. These emissions contribute directly to climate change, which, the suit alleges, could lead to severe environmental and health impacts, including a doubling of heat-related deaths in Los Angeles. The suit claims that the melting of the snows that feed California’s water supply could lead to water shortages that would “harm residents, hurt agriculture, disrupt other businesses, cut the source of hydroelectric power and significantly increase the damage caused by wildfires”. The suit points out that means for reducing carbon dioxide emissions are both affordable and available.

This lawsuit has been driven by one of the factors that also leaves the US facing so much international criticism over climate change: Bush’s refusal to do anything useful. In an article in the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law, David Grossman acknowledged that the “widely perceived lack of meaningful political action in the US to address global warming” has potentially left litigation as “the best tool for addressing climate change in the foreseeable future”.

However, the problem had been not just the lack of “meaningful action”; the lack of a clearly connected chain of events from fossil-fuel use to unpredictable weather patterns had also proved problematic. This began to shift in 2001 with the release of the third climate-change assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report found that it was “likely” (better than a two in three chance) that human activities were causing the global climate to warm up. Some environmental lawyers saw this as hugely significant in paving the way for compensation claims against those responsible for climate change.

Peter Roderick, a lawyer who has worked with Friends of the Earth International, stated: “I think there is no doubt at all now that the third assessment report has taken forward the legal significance of the science, and this next decade is going to see quite a lot of climate change cases around the world.” Even the Financial Times speculated recently that corporations that delay taking action on climate change could be sued by their investors for “incurring higher costs as a result of unduly delaying emission reductions, damaging a company’s reputation and failing to disclose investment-relevant information”.

The issue of attribution – finding out where responsibility lies for the dramatic changes that are taking place as a result of global warming – is becoming increasingly unavoidable. As Myles Allen put it in the journal Nature, in between sandbagging his doorstep from the rising Thames floodwaters outside his Oxford home, in February 2003: “The issue is important as it touches on a question that is far closer to many of our hearts than global sustainability or planetary survival – who to sue when the house price falls?”

Far be it from anyone in the UK to underestimate the motivational power of falling house prices. And, even though it isn’t exactly based in a revolutionary consciousness, the use of legal channels for compensation may stimulate the public engagement that is needed, but still lacking, on tackling emissions and climate change. Maybe it is time for the oil companies that extract and promote the fossil fuels that lead to carbon emissions to really watch out. After all, as Allen wryly observed, if climate change leads to higher insurance premiums or lower house prices then “even the most impassioned eco-warrior has nothing on a homeowner faced with negative equity”.

For more on climate change legal cases, see the website of the international legal-action pressure group the Climate Justice Programme at www.climatelaw.org

The Extractive Industries Review (EIR) was commissioned in 2001 to examine what role, if any, the World Bank has in the extractive industries (oil, gas and mining). It contained many criticisms of bank practice in this area, and suggested that in some cases World Bank involvement even made situations worse.

Predictably, the bank’s management was having none of it and advised that the EIR’s bold recommendations should be rejected. The official response is due in mid-July and is likely to pooh-pooh such utopian recommendations as spending the bulk of bank funding on renewables, rather than fossil fuels. Yet the report and the responses it has generated highlight some interesting issues. They hold some useful lessons for the G8 summit, which is taking place in the UK next year.

The EIR builds on concerns that NGOs had raised for years about bank projects. However, this time the concerns – impacts on human rights and climate change – came out of a process initiated from within the bank itself. Headed by former Indonesian environment minister Dr Emil Salim, the EIR is written in the bank’s language and makes recommendations in a context of what is possible within its working practices.

Salim may have used the bank’s language but, as far as key decision-makers were concerned, he had surely picked up the wrong hymn sheet. For the political realities of the World Bank mean that the chances of the bank ending its subsidies to fossil fuels are pretty slim.

To start with, decisions in the bank are dominated by the world’s most oil-hungry countries. The majority of oil pumped in bank-funded projects feeds demand from those countries” electorates, and most of the subsidies provided by the bank feed demand from their fossil-fuel corporations. According to the US-based Sustainable Energy and Economy Network, these companies have received World Bank-approved financial packages worth more than $10.7 billion since 1992. The bank also acts as a politically low-risk vehicle for securing new energy supplies, particularly ones outside the Middle East – a region increasingly unsafe for Western oil workers and unstable for Western markets.

Another aspect of the World Bank’s appeal as a partner for more commercial ventures is its thin veneer of moral legitimacy, for the bank has an institutional mandate to alleviate poverty. Backing up the EIR’s concerns, a recent report from the New Economics Foundation (NEF) says that countries tend to go deeper into debt as a result of global energy policies” emphasis on fossil fuels.

The Price of Power states that the infrastructure needed for fossil-fuel distribution is expensive and highly centralised, and does little for overall access to energy. Reliance on imported fossil-fuel-based energy locks countries into a dependency relationship with multilateral donors and foreign companies. Poorer countries are thus driven deeper into debt. The report concludes that even a small shift away from fossil fuels towards clean renewable energy could save millions of lives and help avert climate change.

The World Bank’s inevitable rejection of the EIR’s recommendations will not be the tragic end to this particular tale. For the most dominant decision-makers at the bank are practically the same bunch of people that will attend the G8 summit when it comes to Scotland next June. If Tony Blair has his way, this unofficial gathering of the world’s most industrialised countries will place the twin perils of climate change and global poverty at the top of its agenda.

Gordon Brown’s interest in debt relief should lead to plenty of fine words on the subject of tackling poverty. Oxfam is running a campaign “to make poverty history”; but the evidence is becoming irrefutable that unless the fossil-fuel industry becomes history, poverty will remain part of the present. Those who kicked the EIR into the long grass less than 12 months before the Scottish jamboree will be all too keen to forget this, however, leaving it to social-justice campaigners to make sure that the message is brought home.