Gordon Brown the eco-warrior might swing the green vote his way

The Copenhagen summit is not only important for the planet - it could also shape politics at home, says Mary Riddell.

Mary Riddell Published: 7:33PM GMT 30 Nov 2009

Death by motorcade is a hazard for hangers-on at diplomatic circuses. Stuck on a New York pavement some weeks ago, I watched a delegation hurtle past on its way to the UN climate change summit. While Barack Obama's convoy stretches the length of a Manhattan block, this modest retinue comprised only five vehicles and inspired a sigh of what sounded like sympathy from the foreign negotiator standing next to me. "Sierra Leone," he said pityingly.
Some travel even less lavishly at such events. Ed Miliband, Britain's Climate Change Secretary, mostly goes on foot. But New York's limo-loving leaders seemed to symbolise the summit's gridlocked agenda: few revealed what, if anything, they might bring to the Copenhagen conference. Rarely, it sometimes seemed, had so much hot air and carbon been emitted to so little end.

This weekend the motorcades move into Copenhagen for the summit that may determine the future of mankind. Although no one is certain, or even optimistic, that a deal can be done, few governments are driving the agenda more forcefully than the British.
While the ebbs and flows of Gordon Brown's premiership have been marked by floods (Gloucester in 2007 and now Cumbria), the broader politics of weather once appeared to pass him by. His conversion to climate change evangelist came when he first read Lord Stern's report and realised that the thesis married his two favourite subjects: planetary salvation and economic revival. Since then he has spread the message that the market could help curb global warming and propel Britain out of recession on a wave of green jobs and eco-technology.
Not since the emergence of Swampy, the Newbury bypass tunneller, has Britain produced a doughtier eco-warrior than Mr Brown. His garden boasts a wormery and compost bins, his computer is never left on stand-by, and No 10's feuds and furores are illuminated by low-energy light bulbs.
It is, however, on the international stage that Mr Brown is most effective. In the "climate emergency", he has discovered another epochal event, like the recession, that plays to his penchant for car-wreck politics. The PM is a catastrophile in the sense that he is suited, by temperament and intellect, to tackling global disaster.
The £13.3 billion fund he unveiled at the Commonwealth meeting will channel money from rich countries to poorer ones (Britain will donate £800 million) and so give immediate aid to nations hit by hurricanes and drought. Besides launching this vital plan, Mr Brown is said by allies to have quashed the "silly numbers" advanced by some countries who wanted help equating to 1 per cent of GDP, on top of 0.7 per cent in development aid.
Mr Brown was also the first leader to say he would go to Copenhagen. More than 80 heads of government and state have since followed suit, including Mr Obama. Although the President will arrive too early and offer too little, both his presence and the US offer to cut carbon emissions to 17 per cent below 2005 levels by 2020 are deemed a passable start from a man placed in "an impossible situation" by foot-dragging compatriots.
The offer from China, the other key player, attracts no such guarded optimism. A pledge to decrease carbon intensity by 45 per cent by 2020 (an effective emissions increase) has been met with public politeness and private alarm. The numbers, one expert says, are "frankly disappointing". If Beijing does not up its game, then Copenhagen could end in disaster.
With no hope of a legally binding treaty, optimists still hope for a deal halting global warming at two degrees, put into force immediately (unlike Kyoto, which took eight years) and ratified in law in 2010.
It is hard to gauge how much all this preoccupies Mr Brown's top team. Though the Cabinet includes some ardent recyclers and composters, a widespread view is: leave it to Ed. It is true that Mr Miliband is displaying a skill and fluency that attracts admiration bordering on reverence at No 10. While not every senior minister is as enthusiastic ("Wind farms are b------", one heretic told me last week), David Cameron cannot be accused of lack of interest.
Once the Tories' ethical man, towed by huskies across ice floes and planning a wind turbine on his roof, his espousal of blue-green politics put his party above Labour as the voters' eco-choice. Mr Cameron's greenery subsequently wilted so fast that he and George Osborne barely mentioned the environment in their conference speeches. These omissions were hastily rectified last week.
Mr Cameron declared his "passionate" commitment to Copenhagen amid a plethora of initiatives, including Mr Osborne's plan for a "green recovery" and paying people to recycle. The shadow chancellor's charge that the Treasury has been "indifferent" or "obstructive" was greeted with derision by Alistair Darling, who – as anyone who listened to his Budget speech and G20 messages could affirm – has plugged green issues to the point of narcolepsy.
Promises of green ISAs and an investment bank, however shakily financed, are a mark of the Tories' desire to recapture an agenda sidelined by Mr Cameron, many of whose supporters balk at wind turbines on their doorsteps (or anyone else's) and won't wear high-speed rail links carved through Middle English pastures.
Neither party has yet struck a populist chord. Stories of the tax status of Zac Goldsmith, Mr Cameron's land-owning organic guru, remind voters that peasant farming is more fun for non-doms than for peasants, while government backing of a report urging cow-free diets suggests a Marie Antoinette-style edict: let them eat tofu. Meanwhile, the less said about Heathrow expansion the better.
However clumsy their overtures, both parties know the eco-vote is vital. In Brighton and Norwich, Labour could yet be unseated by the Green Party, but the real election game-changers will be the semi-greens: the vast constituency who fear for their children's and their grandchildren's future. Unlike the American Right, they do not think climate change is less credible than the tooth fairy. Unlike Lord Lawson, they do not consider agnosticism a prudent stance when scientists (of whom he is not one) have produced overwhelming evidence of looming catastrophe. Unlike sceptics seeking diversionary tactics, they don't think emails disgracefully suggestive of faked statistics at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit should divert attention from Copenhagen.
In key marginals, the semi-greens may vote for the mainstream party with the best environment policy. On current indicators, that will not be Mr Cameron, who is losing the support of the powerful NGOs once persuaded by his green agenda and now swinging back to Mr Brown.
A general election is inconsequential compared to what's at stake in Copenhagen. Nor may Mr Brown's impressive away performance compensate for the weaknesses in his home game. Even so, Denmark will shape political as well as planetary destinies. Mr Cameron is right to be afraid.