The Kyoto Protocol - it's just 'so not there'

But both the principle of offsetting and its actual practice are open to serious criticism. While Hamilton has done a lot of great work on climate change policy, and while he is right to defend Kyoto from some kinds of criticism, we need to be uncompromisingly realistic about its weaknesses too. When referring to the clean development mechanism, George Monbiot, author the best selling Heat, has declared that he cannot “think of a more effective means of postponing the hard choices we need to make now ... Buying and selling carbon offsets is like pushing the food around on your plate to create the impression that you have eaten it.”

The crucial questions for this still quintessential market instrument are time, scale and transparency. Will enough food go down quickly enough this way? As for lack of transparency: it makes real accounting more or less impossible and fraud, already extensive in the offsetting industry, a piece of cake - staying with the food metaphor.

So is there another way of engaging five, going on eight billion, people in the developing world and giving Kyoto the muscle to do so? The big problem, of course, is money. If such huge numbers don’t have the money for clean energy, then insisting on the user-pays principle is just plain dumb. So is pretending that these matters will all take care of themselves if we sign up for 50 or 60 per cent cuts with the rich club. Both courses of inaction are suicidal.

So how much money would an effective post-Kyoto Protocol need - one with real targets and the means to fund them where users cannot pay or when direct public investment makes more sense? The rough answer is about $300 billion a year until the work is done and new clean energy regimes are normalised in half a century, perhaps.

That’s a lot of money and you can’t just find it anywhere. But you can find it somewhere and at the Postkyoto Centre we would suggest world military spending. The world’s military currently spends about $1.3 trillion each year. That’s a recurrent fund four times greater than the cost of a pretty good global carbon conversion program.

Why not, in true biblical fashion, turn swords to ploughshares, garner a quarter of that budget and turn it to really creative account? It’s not as if the nations of the world would be disarming. (Heaven forbid!) Just some of its swords … Surely the $1 trillion they had left would be enough to satisfy the human thirst for destruction. At the height of the Cold War, $1 trillion was enough. More interesting, even at the Pentagon the search is on for carbon clean ways to fight war. There are some caring people there and a seed has been planted.

Also diverting money to climate change prevention would reduce major sources of tension in coming decades - arguably the most important sources. If we put the brakes on drought, for example, or if we started to seriously limit oil dependence … well, we could avoid more oil wars and coming water wars. So diverting money from weapons would not subtract from global security. Might even do a lot of good. Two further benefits. No child need go hungry to fund carbon conversion and the whole world, all 160 nations that have money to spare for militaries would pay. No free riders for John or George to fret about.