The panel debate 'Climate change: is a global deal possible?' took place at 'Change the World', the Fabian new year conference 2008 on Saturday 19th January 2008 at Imperial College London. The speakers were Hilary Benn MP; Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Lord Michael Jay (former Head of the Diplomatic Service); Malini Mehra (Centre for Social Markets, Delhi); Par Nuder (former Swedish Finance Minister), with Nick Butler (University of Cambridge Centre for Energy Studies; and Fabian Executive) in the chair.

Saturday, 19th January

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More public pressure is essential to make a global deal possible, but guilt can't motivate the changes we need, leading environmental campaigner tells Fabian conference.

Environmental campaigners will fail to motivate publics to act if they rely on 'doom and gloom' scenarios and appeal to guilt rather than hope to bring about action on climate change, a leading Indian environmental expert told the Fabian Change the World conference.

Malina Mehra, Director of the Delhi-based Centre for Social Markets, said that twenty years experience of campaigning on the environment left her convinced that environmentalists were their own worst enemies when they appealed to guilt rather than hope in seeking to bring about change.

'We need dramatic and graphic ways to illustrate the scale of the challenge. But rather than doom and gloom, we need to look to the future to really motivate and inspire change, and sense this amazing moment we have build to deal with this challenge", she said.

But the need to get across the scale and urgency of the climate change challenge was a central theme of the panel discussion, titled 'Climate Change: is a global deal possible?'

'A global deal on climate change has to be possible, or we're sunk', declared British environment secretary Hilary Benn. 'We have got to move from people being transfixed in the headlights, frozen by the scale of the challenge", he said.

Benn said that the communication challenge "is as big as it gets". The public had to be convinced in order to motivate politicians to make a deal.

Lord Michael Jay, former permanent secretary at the Foreign Office, said, "the Bali meeting set out glimmers of an outline of a deal, so the task for the next two years is to make it happen". Jay had been Tony Blair's personal representative at the G8 Gleneagles meeting in 2005, and said there had been a significant shift from climate change having been regarded as "a second order issue" by other countries' representatives prior to the meeting.

But, while climate change has a much higher public profile, the conference was warned that it is not a priority issue for most voters. Nick Butler observed, "climate change isn't even in the top eight issues in the Presidential elections in the US, and isn't in the top five issues in the UK".

Former Swedish Finance Minister, Par Nuder argued that "government needs to make the challenge visible, to show that people stay alive through concrete actions". "Coming from a country that has reduced its carbon emissions by ten per cent over the last decade, while increasing economic growth, it shows that it is possible to combine the two, but it comes down to whether or not we are willing to take on the challenge of public opinion", Nuder said. "We saw this in Sweden, that while it was very unpopular to raise taxes or fuel, we balanced this with inward taxes on labour at the same time.

Mehra said that many small developments, such as farmers' markets, showed that people are willing to take personal responsibility for change, welcoming the efforts of "individual heroes, like Jamie Oliver, who is creating a revolution".

There was also agreement that no single energy source offers a viable alternative to carbon-heavy fossil fuels. Benn argued that biofuels and nuclear power both have a contribution to make to the overall energy mix, but neither is the answer: "On biofuels, we could meet transport fuel demands if we used all available land, but of course we'd all starve if land was used in this way".

Drawing on the Swedish experience, Nuder said, "I come from a country which is dependent on nuclear energy for fifty per cent of our energy supply. But, we have decided in a referendum in 1980 to phase it out. We were dramatically affected by Chernobyl. Nuclear is not the solution in the long-term, because it isn't renewable and because it will take time to invest in nuclear – and we can't afford to wait".

Malina Mehra was sceptical about nuclear power in India. "We've gone blindly down the route towards nuclear without any discussion. For nuclear to be a viable option, you need systems that really work".

Par Nuder argued that "one of the most promising trends in the last year is the growing awareness amongst the business community. As companies such as Volvo have realised, the only way to survive is to become green manufacturers".

"What helps is when the business community gets up and says it recognises the cost of doing something is less than the cost of not doing anything", Benn observed, for example when light bulb manufacturers agreed to phase out old Victorian style light bulbs. Sir Michael Jay agreed that new energy technology must be low carbon, since energy use is predicted to rise by 55 per cent over the next twenty years. But manufacturers in the car industry are still reluctant to invest in new technology because of the impact on price. "Hence, we need EU regulatory framework to set a low enough limit to emissions from each car to ensure that manufacturers actually embrace the new technology", Jay said.

Hilary Benn stressed the need for equity in the long-term: "The single most important task for climate change negotiation is how to find a mechanism for allocating resources fairly between countries and economies". Benn also addressed the question of the responsibility of India and China for neighbouring countries and regions, pointing out that "much of Bangladesh will be moving house if climate change proceeds as expected, and many will be moving to India. There is a rising awareness of these issues, but clearly we cannot do it without India and China".