Danish Blues

With the Copenhagen summit now underway, global attention is focused on the climate change issue, arguably as never before.

Our latest BBC World Service poll shows that – even in the midst of a recession – public concern over the climate has reached its highest level in the 11 years we’ve been tracking it. In total, 64% of those across the 24 countries we polled said they considered climate change a ‘very serious’ problem. In 13 of the countries we’ve been asking this question on a regular basis since 1998, and we’ve seen a sharp increase in concern on this measure from 44% to 63% overall.

Undoubtedly, until the buildup to COP15 started, the economic crisis had been keeping climate change out of the headlines, and the proportion of people in our polling naming the environment as the biggest issue facing their country dropped sharply. But while the economy was imploding, the steady accrual of alarming news about the climate has propelled concern about climate change – a problem which is, let’s not forget, complex, multi-faceted and (at least for now) somewhat abstract – to new heights. As our poll shows, there is substantial support for governments taking a strong line and supporting ambitious targets to fight climate change.

The UEA emails row may have provided a straw to clutch at for the sceptically-minded and the conspiracy theorists. But the likelihood is that any dampening effect that this has on concern will be temporary – particularly if we see a repeat of the scorching summers, hurricanes and snow-free winters that have become an increasing feature of the last decade.

What our poll also shows, however, is that leadership at Copenhagen will probably have to come from somewhere else besides the world’s two leading CO2 emitters, China and the USA. In both of those countries, concern has dropped back since 2007, and both are ambivalent about their governments pushing for a strong global climate agreement in Denmark.

No glamour, thanks - we're European

Attempting to decipher EU politics has never been the easiest of tasks, and true to form, leaders sprang something of a surprise last week in agreeing appointees for two powerful new positions, apparently over dinner .

These appointments are the culmination of a long reform process encapsulated in the Lisbon Treaty, which should make the process of passing legislation considerably less protracted.

However, in appointing the key figures who will oversee these new arrangements, has the EU missed an opportunity to strengthen the role of Europe in the world?

With Tony Blair earlier touted as a candidate, most attention has been focussed on the Presidency. However, the President’s role is envisioned as largely administrative, involving coordinating the meetings of the European Council. In this respect, the Belgian PM, Herman van Rompuy looks to be a good choice – a quiet and uncontroversial figure.

By contrast, the new High Representative for Foreign Affairs - the UK’s Baroness Cathy Ashton - will speak for the EU on foreign policy issues, and is mandated to negotiate on behalf of its member states. She will also have at her disposal a newly created diplomatic corps .

This marks a significant step towards a stronger European voice in the world – something which GlobeScan’s polling indicates would be widely welcomed: in a study conducted on behalf of the British Council in 2008, solid majorities in 8 out of 9 countries expressed the belief that the EU already has a positive role in the world.

But will Ashton’s appointment deliver a stronger European voice? This role seems designed to suit a high-profile figure well-versed in foreign affairs. By many accounts Ashton performed well in her previous post as Trade Commissioner and is respected in Brussels. However, she has also never held a foreign affairs role and could struggle for visibility, which has led some to question the wisdom of the choice.

Most of all, this decision has hardly done much to enhance perceptions of the EU as democratic and transparent: France and Germany have dominated the selection process from the beginning, and Van Rompuy’s selection was sealed after Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel agreed a common position . In this context, the appointment of Ashton looks like a succesful attempt to buy off British oppostion on the Presidency after the Franco-German duo decided “that’s Blair enough, thank you very much”.

Lisbon is a real step forward, but key decisions are still being made by the two biggest players, still involve complex horse-trading and are formalised over dinner conversations. A brave new world for the EU in some respects, whereas in others - plus ça change…

Whither the 'green wave'?

Has the green wave peaked? The Economist reported last week that there had been a marked decline in belief in man-made climate change, notably in the US. Citing recent data from Pew, they noted that the proportions believing that the climate was changing, and that human activity was responsible, had dropped from 47% in April 2008 to 36% last month.

Polling in this area is, admittedly, treacherous territory. People's understanding of climate science is hazy. It's one of those areas where they are apt to say one thing and do another. It matters very much what question you ask people (and even what time of year you ask them, which may be a factor in the recent Pew trend in the US). And in a politically charged debate, those seeking to assert that public opinion is on their side can probably find polling data to support their case. We may well examine some more of it in future weeks.

But our data doesn't back up the Economist's thesis. We've been tracking public attitudes around climate change since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the previous peak of environmental concern. While concern fell off markedly in the years following Rio, since the late Nineties, it has been back on an upward curve, and across the 13 countries that we've been able to track consistently since then, the proportion rating climate change as a 'very serious' problem has risen from 43% in 1998 to 62% today. Crucially, the increase has continued this year, albeit at a slower rate - even in the teeth of a global recession.

So what is happening, then? What's clear is that the tumult engulfing the world's markets and the chill economic wind has knocked the environment off the headlines - at least until the Copenhagen hoopla began. So as you'd expect, we've seen the proportions of people in our global tracking spontaneously naming environmental problems as the 'biggest issue facing our country' fall back signficantly - it's a volatile measure that moves up and down according to what's been in the news lately. But underneath that, what's remarkable is the degree to which climate concern remains deeply embedded across many countries - the proportion, for instance, feeling that we need to take 'major steps very soon' to address climate change has remained broadly steady, at nearly two-thirds of the public (63%) across 19 countries.

All things considered, we think that what Pew and others' data shows is mostly that attention, for the moment, is elsewhere. The 'green wave' hasn't, in our view, peaked yet - not by a long way.

Running on...

The 'peak oil' debate - are we or are we not about to reach the limit of our global capacity to extract oil from the ground, and what does this mean? - rumbles on without any sign of a resolution.

Peak oil proponents, like US investment banker Matthew Simmons, assert that most of the accessible reserves of oil will be drilled out within ten to fifteen years, and that the global economy - and particularly gasoline-dependent countries like the USA - risk decades of economic and social upheaval as they try to adjust to a less oil-thirsty lifestyle. Many disagree strongly. Some respected commentators, like former Shell chief economist turned senior UK politician Vince Cable, believe that the case has been overstated and that there is plenty of oil still in the ground - but point out that we risk becoming increasingly dependent either on supplies either from unstable neighourhoods such as Iraq, or from 'unconventional' - and expensive - sources like the tar sands in western Canada

And others still say that all of this still misses the point – that regardless of reserves in the ground, norms, expectations and regulations are shifting rapidly towards an assumption of lower oil usage. It’s quite possible that as people start to perceive the upside of this shift, lower usage will follow. As Alcatel-Lucent chairman Ben Verwaayen pointed out at BSR last week – the move to a sustainable economy is going to change our lives more than the Internet. We shouldn’t assume the old expectations will hold.

The lack of any emerging consensus in the peak oil debate is borne out in our public opinion data. When we asked people in 23 countries last year whether the world will 'continually produce more oil' or not, 47% agreed and 42% disagreed. But the public, at least, seems to take a relaxed view of how we might cope with declining oil production - 64% agree that their country can generate enough energy from renewable sources to replace coal, oil - and nuclear - in 20 years.

Whether this is overly optimistic is an issue partially addressed by an interesting new report from the UK Energy Research Council, which looks to have moved the debate forward. Yes, they concede, there may still be large reserves of conventional oil still available. But technical limitations mean they are unlikely to be exploited quickly enough to compensate for the decline in the 'mature' fields - and we may see production peak anyway before 2020. The push for renewables and greater fuel efficiency in climate change policy will help - but there will also be a 'strong incentive' to exploit high carbon non-conventional fuels such as liquefied coal, with potentially disastrous environmental consequences. And they warn that the ongoing volatility of oil prices - which spiked again this week amid economic uncertainty - remains a major disincentive to investment in the sort of alternative energy strategies that the public confidently seem to expect.

Looks like the peak oil debate has a while to run yet.

Free Market Blues, 20 Years On

Some news, in case you missed it (unlikely, given the current wave of anniversary fever): the Berlin Wall came down 20 years ago, triggering the collapse of communist governments across Eastern Europe, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and prompting American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama to announce the ‘end of history’. Liberal democracy – and economic liberalism – had triumphed everywhere and ‘mankind’s ideological evolution’ was at an end.

What with the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and 9/11, Fukuyama’s verdict on liberal democracy has been looking rather premature for a while now. But when it came to the economics, to capitalism and the free market – surely Fukuyama had it right there, didn’t he? It’s a question we’ve been exploring in our latest global polling for BBC World Service.

The popular verdict on capitalism, it turns out, is pretty lukewarm. Across the 27 countries we polled, we found little unalloyed enthusiasm for the free market system – an average of just 11% said they thought it worked well and did not need further regulation. A bare majority felt that capitalism had problems that could be addressed by regulation or reform (51%). And nearly a quarter (23%) – felt that capitalism was ‘fatally flawed’.

At the same time, the numbers telling us they see free enterprise as the best system on which to base the future of the world have been drifting down. 54% feel that way now, compared to 63% when we started tracking in 2002.Trust in global companies, meanwhile, continues to decline.

In view of these misgivings, then, why is it that the fall of the big banks last year doesn’t really look likely to rival the Berlin Wall collapse in terms of its long term impact on our economic beliefs? Maybe it’s because there still isn’t really an established alternative model to free market capitalism – Hugo Chavez notwithstanding - for public opinion to rally around. And our increased scepticism of political leaders means that such a new system might find it hard to establish itself. But if Fukuyama was right, and capitalism has won, it looks these days rather like a victory by default.

Consumer Confidence - Has Asia's Economic Sprint Resumed?

There has been much talk of the economic upheaval of the last year as a ‘global’ crisis. And with emergency meetings of the G20 called to address a critical loss of confidence in the banking sector as well as global capital flows still a fraction of what they were, that has seemed like a fair assessment. But perhaps we need to reconsider that ‘global’ tag.

In much of Asia, the recession is looking more and more like a short pause for breath in an economic sprint that’s still ongoing. China’s Statistics Bureau announced at the end of last week that the country’s GDP in the third quarter of 2009 was 8.9% up on the same period last year. Indonesia’s economy is expected to grow at 4% this year – not at all shabby. Compare this to economies in North America and Europe, where if things look a little less bleak than they once did, the return to economic growth is slow and shaky, and a lapse back into recession well within the bounds of possibility. And in some major economies - notably here in the UK, where figures last week showed the economy continuing to contract in the third quarter, it’s far from clear that the recovery has got going at all.

This picture is amply borne out by our International Consumer Sentiment Index - the first in what we hope will be an annual study of consumer confidence across the world. We’ve taken the same approach that academics at the University of Michigan have adopted in monitoring US consumer confidence for more than fifty years, asking people across 22 countries to assess how their finances compare to this time last year, how they expect them to change in the next year, what they think will happen to their country’s economy over the next year and the next five years, and whether they think now is a good time to make major household purchases.

Chinese consumers emerge as the most confident by a long way, with an index score of 113.5, with Indonesians second, recording a score of 100.6. Americans were at only 71.9, and the terminally gloomy Japanese at only 45.1. To put it in some historical context, the highest level of US consumer confidence recorded over recent years was at the height of the dotcom bubble in February 2000, when 111.3 was recorded, while the lowest was in May 1980 as the energy crisis and impending recession started to bite. With two-thirds of Chinese expecting to be richer in a year’s time, perhaps it’s no surprise their economy is booming again – as we know, confidence is central to any economic recovery. And maybe the much-anticipated changing of the economic guard, with the US giving way to China as the motor of growth, is starting to happen sooner than we thought?

Weapons of Mass Delusion

GlobeScan is in the business of measuring perceptions, not facts. This is something I frequently find myself reminding clients when presenting research findings that sometimes show that their stakeholders or consumers have a much hazier - or just plain wrong - sense of what their organisation is doing than they might like. Unless you've invested almost as much time, energy and thought in understanding your stakeholders' perceptions and communicating to them what you're doing as you have in actually doing it, don't expect to be given the credit.

That said, while they can be serious and expensive, misperceptions are rarely a matter of life and death for our clients. The same could not be said of the various misperceptions that led up to the second Gulf War in 2003 - the most glaring one being that Saddam Hussein possessed the infamous 'weapons of mass destruction'. I was interested to read in last week's Washington Post that Saddam told the FBI that he allowed the myth to be perpetuated largely because he was worried about appearing weak to the 'fanatic' (as opposed, presumably, to just regularly psychopathic) Iranian leaders - and would in fact have been open to a 'security agreement' with the USA to protect Iraq from a potential Iranian attack.

Given the human, political and economic consequences of the decision to invade, this could be one of the costliest perception misreadings of all time. At the very least, it's a reminder to the rest of us take some time to make sure we really understand what other interested parties are thinking before embarking on our own risky projects.