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.