We face a problem of anthropogenic climate change, but the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 has failed to tackle it. A child of summits, it was doomed from the beginning, because of the way that it came into being, Kyoto has given only an illusion of action. It has become the sole focus of our efforts, and, as a result, we have wasted fifteen years. We have called this essay “The Wrong Trousers” evoking the Oscar-winning animated film of that name. In that film, the hapless hero, Wallace, becomes trapped in a pair of automated ‘Techno Trousers’. Whereas he thought they would make his life easier, in fact, they take control and carry him off in directions he does not wish to go. We evoke this image to suggest how the Kyoto Protocol has also marched us involuntarily to unintended and unwelcome places. Just as the enticingly electro-mechanical “Techno Trousers” offered the prospect of hugely increasing the wearer’s power and stride, so successful international treaties leverage the power of signatory states in a similar way, making possible together what cannot be achieved alone. The Kyoto Wrong Trousers have done something similar to those who fashioned and subscribed to the agreement. To set a new course, we need to understand how we have gone wrong so far. Accordingly, the essay proceeds in three sections, as follows: I. Kyoto: From Treaty to Creed Recognition is growing of the many and serious shortcomings of the Kyoto Protocol and these are explained in this section. Some are technical; but others come because Kyoto has become a surrogate for other fights, as well as a dogma. Before the next meeting in Bali, Indonesia, locks down the post-2012 phase of climate change policy, there is a slim window of opportunity to implement a more productive approach. II. Why Did the Kyoto Protocol Fail? The Kyoto Protocol was doomed from the beginning because it was modelled on plausible but inappropriate precedents. We explain the failure of the Kyoto Protocol and discover what we can learn from its history in order to better design future policy. We can discard the usual reasons given for the failure of the Kyoto protocol: that there is no problem of climate change; that certain key states have not signed up; or that political will was lacking. As the IPCC shows, there is a problem. Certain states, notably the USA and Australia, may have refused to sign up, but Kyoto has failed even in Europe and Japan, both of which enthusiastically adopted it and have paid huge sums to meet targets via “carbon offset” credits. There is plenty of political will, but it is driving a defective political process. The Kyoto Protocol failed because it is the wrong type of instrument (a universal intergovernmental treaty) relying too heavily on the wrong agents exercising the wrong sort of power to create, from the top down, a carbon market. It relies on establishing a global market by government fiat, which has never been done successfully for any commodity. Such fabricated markets invite sharp and corrupt practices–and these are now occurring on a large scale in the European Emissions Trading Scheme and through Kyoto Clean Development Mechanism scams such as HFC combustion. This accounts for two-thirds of all CDM payments to 2012. On false premises, it dodged increasing challenges that result from industrialisation in China and India, in particular the growing use of coal in both countries. Kyoto was constructed by quick borrowing from past practice with other treaty regimes dealing with ozone, sulphur emissions and nuclear bombs which, while superficially plausible, are not applicable in the ways that the drafters assumed because these were “tame” problems (complicated, but with defined and achievable end-states), whereas climate change is “wicked” (comprising open, complex and imperfectly understood systems). Technical knowledge was taken as sufficient basis from which to derive Kyoto’s policy, whereas “wicked” problems demand profound understanding of their integration in social systems, and their ongoing development. The presentation of Kyoto as the only course of action has raised the political price of admitting its defects, not least because it would mean admitting that the non-signatories may have been right in practice, whatever their motives. Its advocates invested emotional as well as political capital in the process, making it difficult to contemplate the idea that it is fatally flawed. Its narrow focus on mitigating the emission of greenhouse gases (in which it has failed) has created a taboo on discussing other approaches, in particular, adaptation to climate change. Failure to adapt will cost the poor and vulnerable the most. For the past fifteen years, it has given the concerned public an illusion of effective action, tranquillising political concern. This has been, perhaps, its most damaging legacy. III. The Right Trousers The final section sets down the principles that should underpin a viable engagement with climate security. In it, we take a radically different approach from the top-down command and regulatory regime of output targets that is Kyoto. Our approach is both older and simpler. It sets out to harness enlightened self-interest to drive a process designed to generate a range of possible solutions, which can be compared and assessed, mixed and matched, changed and refined as we pursue the goal of climate security. In this essay, the reader will not find a detailed critique of the Kyoto mechanisms. Nor will the reader find a proposal for a different single solution in place of Kyoto. We have refrained from this because climate change is not a discrete problem amenable to any single shot solution, be it Kyoto or any other. Climate change is the result of a particular development path and its globally interlaced supply system of fossil energy. No single intervention can change such a complex nexus (although as the earlier sections have shown, the attempt to do so has produced unintended and unwelcome effects). There is no simple silver bullet. Instead, we suggest that in cases like this, the best line of attack is not head-on. We suggest that the policy response to climate change should assemble instead a portfolio of approaches—silver buckshot, rather than silver bullet—that would move us in the right direction, even though it is impossible to predict which of these approaches might stimulate the necessary fundamental change. This is a process of social learning in which we must be always alert to maintain our trajectory towards the goal by constant course corrections and improvements which, by definition, cannot be prescribed precisely beforehand. In the third section we elaborate the following seven basic principles of such a radically re-thought approach: 1. Use silver buckshot; 2. Abandon universalism; 3. Devise trading schemes from the bottom up; 4. Deal with problems at the lowest possible levels of decision-making; 5. Invest in technology R&D; 6. Increase spending on adaptation; 7. Understand that successful climate policy does not necessarily focus instrumentally on the climate. Throughout we emphasise the urgency of re-framing climate policy in this way because whereas today there is strong public support for climate action, continued policy failure on the Kyoto principles spun as a story of success could lead to public withdrawal of trust and consent for action, whatever form it takes.
