Unrealpolitik

Three weeks on from Copenhagen, and the blanket of snow currently enveloping much of the northern hemisphere hasn't obscured deep disappointment about the outcome of December's climate conference. No one appears to believe that the deal achieved is sufficient to make an impact on global carbon emissions and limit global warming to within safe levels.

Who's to blame? The list of candidates is long. The image of hapless hosts Denmark may take some time to recover. But what has become increasingly apparent over recent weeks is the lengths that the Chinese delegation were prepared to go to in order to avoid being subjected to a binding global agreement that might hamper their growth . Mark Lynas's account in The Guardian of the walkouts, the snubs and the last-minute scuppering of targets that did not even affect China makes depressing reading.

Given the level of ambivalence among the Chinese public about a strong global deal at Copenhagen (as we noted last month) this attitude by their leaders should not perhaps have come as a surprise. But, by any standards, theirs was pretty ruthless behaviour. That being the case, you might have thought that climate activists and NGOs would not be slow to point the finger?

Not so. Their ire has been directed almost exclusively at the countries of the developed West and, in the case of George Monbiot, at Barack Obama himself. The ink on the non-deal was barely dry before John Sauven of Greenpeace was referring to Copenhagen as a 'crime scene, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport'. Regardless of what Western countries might have put on the table (and in some cases it was substantial), and regardless of Chinese wrecking tactics, the environmental movement's mindset required that the West were identified as the villains of the piece.

Monbiot bemoans the failure of concerned liberals to take to the streets in large numbers to demand action on the climate from their leaders. But why are we surprised? In relentlessly accentuating the negative, ramping up the rhetoric to ever greater heights and allowing post-industrial guilt to trump a sense of what can actually be achieved, the environmental movement has itself been guilty of disempowering those who might have been supporters. If you portray the problem of climate change as unimaginably huge, decry any attempt to tackle it politically as a shameful betrayal and make no attempt to help people imagine how they might live fulfilling lives in a low-carbon world, don't be surprised if most of them bury their heads in the sand.

A few weeks before Copenhagen, I attended a gathering of NGOs, think tanks, labour organisations and corporates to discuss the 'green economy'. Talk turned glumly to Copenhagen, and I wondered aloud to a senior campaigner at one of the major environmental NGOs why his organisation wasn't concentrating its efforts on where advances could be made – lobbying multinationals, working with enlightened US states, championing new technologies. This was sniffily dismissed as 'realpolitik' and I was assured that 'doom and gloom is what we do best'.

This seems breathtakingly complacent to me. Our research shows that while NGOs are still trusted more than most institutions, trust in them is declining and people value them more for the aid and assistance they give than their campaigning work. Instead of peddling 'unrealpolitik', environmental NGOs – and the movement as a whole – should be taking advantage of the fact that they don't have elections to win every few years and play a positive role - building coalitions, articulating a vision, thinking the unthinkable, helping people to imagine what a different future could look like. It's never been more important.