Member News
28th September 2010
Ed Miliband's handling of last year's Copenhagen climate change summit marked him out as a future leader, according to Emily Thornberry.
Speaking at the Labour Party conference in Manchester the shadow climate change minister said the party's new leader was one of the few people to emerge from the conference with any credibility.
"All of us in the Labour party have been making a very difficult decision these past few weeks over who to choose as our leader. Having been at the Copenhagen summit, I can say that very few people came out of Copenhagen with any credibility, but Ed Miliband certainly did," she said.
Thornberry was addressing the 'After Copenhagen: How can we galvanise global action on climate change' fringe meeting hosted by the Foreign Policy Centre and Rio Tinto.
She went on to outline the "extremely difficult and highly complex" procedures at December’s gathering, including various humorous incidents, such as the regularly breaking heating system and confusion over accreditation passes.
And the Islington South and Finsbury MP said that unless action was taken ahead of the next climate change conference in Cancun, Mexico, sufficient progress on global warming would not be made.
"Many people have noted that countries have been walking backwards since Copenhagen and struggling to make progress," she said.
"We need to work out what we can achieve from Cancun and go out and achieve it. If we end up leaving Cancun with nothing that is worse than not going at all."
Michael Jacobs, Gordon Brown’s former special adviser on climate change, discussed the reasons for the perceived failure at Copenhagen.
"Arriving at Copenhagen we were not trying to negotiate a treaty. Six months before Copenhagen it was obvious that a treaty was unavailable as the largest nations such as China and USA couldn’t be reconciled to any legal outcome," he said.
"The goal instead was a political agreement, but one that was not legally binding."
The summit was merely at the "wrong time in history", he added.
"The developing powers of Brazil, China, South Africa and India didn’t view this as the right time to pursue lower carbon emissions. China particularly was in the middle of an internal debate as to what type of international agreement they would be willing to sign up to."
Adding to the discussion, Tom Burke, Rio Tinto’s environmental policy advisor, focused on the role that the British government can play in shaping European policy.
"The major problem with Copenhagen was a failure of political will." Burke noted.
"In Britain the last government changed the emphasis of climate science and implemented wide-ranging domestic energy legislation. There is clearly a distinctive role for the UK in shaping EU policy because of this legislative history."
And Malcolm Wicks MP, the former minister for energy, suggested the importance of promoting a mass movement of popular opinion to showcase the dangers of climate change.
"Global warming is the biggest threat to our society. We need to instigate a popular movement in the UK to promote environmental concerns. The current eco-lobby is often perceived as being too elitist."
To find out more about the work of Rio Tinto please view their dedicated ePolitix.com microsite.
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