The Next Premier of Alberta: Rona Ambrose?

It is very clear to those close to the world of Alberta politics that Premier Alison Redford is not likely to be Premier this time next year: "dead Premier walking" is the phrase now being used.  She has no friends in caucus, she is not running the Government of Alberta (Doug Horner is) and is not in control of the policy agenda (hence, no throne speech). The money which backs the party has already written her off and is looking for a successor. Alison herself should, though she is likely not (she is stubborn and determined), be seeking an out which enables her to leave with dignity and grace - Canada's ambassador to the US, Alberta Court of Appeal or a Federal judiciary appointment of note. But the void already exists.

The obvious candidate for succession is Doug Horner. He lost last time to both Garry Mar and Alison Redford and will, as soon as next week, push the budget button which will kill his chances of election by the people, never mind his own party. Thomas Lukaszuk  will run - his ego and hair do will make it difficult for him not to- and loose. Jeff Johnson, scourge of teachers and threat to our school system, may also fancy his chances. But when you mention these names to people that care about Alberta and its future they all say, without exception, "you got to be kiddin' me" (or words to that effect - they are generally not this polite). 

In fact, one of the failures of the Progressive Conservative (sic) party in Alberta is the lack of leadership and the failure to grow and manage succession. This has not been helped by the single transferable vote system it used to ensure that those who are front runners don't win. Ted Morton may fancy his chances, but no one fancies Ted Morton.

So the grandees of the party are looking outside the current crop of MLA's for leadership candidates. One favourite, Jim Prentice, is ruled out because of the fact that he very deliberately left politics, is making a tonne of  money and finds Ontario a comfortable place to live, despite the bizarre nature of its Provincial politics. We can similarly rule out Gary Mar from making a comeback. Former industry leaders in Alberta know enough about Alberta politics not to touch it. So who?

My favourite candidate is Rona Ambrose, current Minister, MP for Edmonton-Spruce Grove since 2004, one very smart woman, and a a natural at political survival. She has experience of the Alberta government - she worked in Intergovernmental Affairs. She is currently Minister of Public Works and Government Services, Minister for the Status of Women, Minister Responsible for Western Economic Diversification, Shared Services Canada and Vice-Chair of the Treasury Board. She survived some bruising times in cabinet and Government. But she is focused, a team player and smart.

To talk to, she is smart, articulate, focused and humourus. She is a smart street politician as well as a thinking politician. She knows Albertan and its challenges well and is rooted in this community. She has championed Alberta in the Commons and in cabinet, though has not always been able to deliver on everything she has championed. She is a straight talker, thinks before she speaks (a trait that some in the Wild Rose need to develop) and can hold her own in a serious debate. 

While part of the rejection of Premier Redford is due to her gender - there are some in politics who still think that politics should be left to men - Rona Ambrose would take on and probably beat Danielle Smith, who otherwise looks like the next Premier of Alberta likely to be elected by the people. 

So, who else? Redford's days are numbered. but part of the reason she is hanging on by the skin of her teeth is that no one can think clearly about who should succeed her. Time to talk to Rona. 

Austerity and Alberta

Austerity

Austerity aims to use harsh measures – tax increases, mass unemployment, reduction in public services, cuts to support for the poor and needy – so as to bring “balance” to the relationship between Government spending and government revenue. It is generally pursued due to the understanding by some that the debt : GDP ratio and level of annual deficit for Government is too high. Such “austerians” are committed to balanced or near balanced budgets and to the idea of small governments and the efficiency of markets.

Austerians tend also to be committed to what is known as “trickle down” economics – lowering taxes on the rich and corporations, since doing so enables them to invest in an economy and stimulate growth. They also believe in using austerity to trigger “confidence” amongst investors in the economy and its firms.

The Problem with Austerity

Austerity tends to increase unemployment and, by doing so, lower tax revenues for government. High unemployment and a government unable to meet budget targets because of lower than expected revenues leads to a lowering of investment, protests by citizens and a lowering of market expectations and confidence. This in turn leads to a lowering of spending on goods and services, which further reduces economic activity, tax revenues and growth. Governments generally miss targets, as can be seen in the case of the UK, Greece, Spain, France, Ireland and Portugal. This sometimes leads rating agencies to lower their ratings of Government bonds, which further adds to economic pressure and increases the need for austerity in the eyes of austerians. At the present time, only Canada and Germany has maintained the highest possible rating by all of the bond rating agencies.

The second problem with austerity is that it leads to massive unemployment. This is both a moral issue – how can government take actions which knowingly increase inequality, poverty and misery? – and an economic one. The higher the level of unemployment the lower the demand for goods and services. This is a vicious cycle, triggered by austerity. In Europe at this time, there are some 20 million unemployed and many young people aged between 18 and 24 have no realistic prospect of employment and have been unemployed for two years or more.

The third problem is the unintended consequences of austerity measures. For example, major cuts in capital expenditure on roads, bridges, schools, hospitals and infrastructure leads to major infrastructure deficits, overcrowding in schools and hospitals and lower educational performance and health outcomes, lowering the attractiveness of the social infrastructure. In the US at this time, a large number of bridges are so fragile that they may soon be declared unsafe.

Another example is that of wage freezes. When Britain imposed wage freezes on all workers during the Callaghan era, employers used “perks” (cars, vacation time, benefits packages and pension deals) to attract and retain workers. When the wage freeze ended some time later, these “perks” were embedded and workers now sought to “catch up” wages “lost” during the freeze. This led to inflation and the lack of competitiveness of many sectors of the UK economy. A temporary austerity fix led to long term challenges for employers and industry.

A related problem is that there is no compelling evidence that trickle down economics works. Lowering taxes on the rich so as to encourage investment simply means that they are richer and they will find more places to stash their cash which they don’t have to invest.

The final problem with austerity is that it doesn’t work. Greece is no nearer to being a stable, vibrant economy than it was before the EU bail-out and austerity measures. Neither is Spain or Portugal. The UK is probably the leading example of austerity as a failed strategy.

An Alternative to Austerity

The Keynsian approach to the recessionary forces at play at this time is not to cut public spending, but to increase it in focused ways so as to stimulate demand. Focused public spending on infrastructure and needed long term investments – education, for example, but also science, technology and innovation – leads to a growth in economic activity, employment and demand for goods and services. This in turn creates employment which increases tax revenues, in corporate taxes, in sales taxes and income taxes. If non future focused spending patterns are adjusted and lowered  – holding the growth of  spending on health, for example – occur at the same time, then balance can be restored.

There is also no such thing as the “confidence fairy”, as the Nobel prize winning economists Paul Krugman likes to point out. Markets do what markets do and their behaviour is rarely a rational response to public policy, evidence or the strategic intentions of firms or governments. Psychologists can better explain herd behaviour.

So…

As Alberta looks at austerity as its only strategy for its future, we should challenge the Government to explain its assumptions about consequences and to state the risks of this strategy and explain why they have rules out alternatives. Don’t hold your breath.

The Last Days of Premier Redford?

The Alberta chatterati – the chatterers about Alberta and politics – seem to have three key convictions. 

The first that Premier Alison Redford is a dead Premier walking. She has lost confidence of caucus, the story goes, and is in the death throes of her administration. 

The second part of this gripping narrative is that, so as to position herself for a graceful exit, she is moving to the right to establish her national credentials as a fiscal and real conservative rather than the liberal lawyer with a funny hair do. 

Finally, in this three part story, Doug Horner has been anointed her natural heir and successor  - having secured the backing of the monied elite in Calgary and the support of caucus.

That is the story. Whether we believe any of it is another question, but there is good evidence that key elements have some credibility.

First, the Premier has never been able to manage her caucus and is clearly not a street-wise politician. Smart, highly articulate, very intelligent and capable, she has never endeared herself to the rural dominated, predominantly male caucus. She does not come from the same place, is “too clever for her own high heels” and is not one to suffer fools gladly. This latter problem is serious, There are several real fools in caucus and some in cabinet. Her own staff, as is shown by some key resignations, has also found her brittle and awkward. It is a shame – she is by far the smartest Premier since Peter Laugheed and has an ability to see beyond the current game and take a long view. But if she can’t bring her own team with her, she is toast. The first rule of leadership is to have people following you. If they are not, de facto, you are no longer the leader.

The second element of the story – that she is moving to the right  - is clearly the case. Key election promises lay in tatters, Her fiscal position rules out new revenues and her solution to our budget challenge is austerity – a  failed policy of the right the globe over. Rather than seeking to stimulate growth and increase revenues, she has fallen for the right wing agenda and is about to announce a min-Klein agenda.

Whether this is to boost her future position as a national conservative or not, she is moving away from the more liberal Premier that stood for election just a few months ago. Fighting with doctors and teachers, cutting or freezing budgets, cutting school budgets and giving up on flagship educational programs and sending in the Deputy Premier to rationalize post-secondary education (a system which Doug Horner complicated and made less comprehensible) are all signs that she has moved to the right.  We will see more signs on March 7^th when the Provincial budget arrives (if it not leaked before).

But whether this is about positioning her for her conservative future I doubt. It just reflects the paucity of imagination in her caucus, the lack of sophistication in their understanding of politics, power and economics and their lack of vision.

If she is gone as Premier by this time next year – a confident prediction of the chatterati – then she will not be eligible as a national conservative leader until a significant period of detoxification and rehabilitation.  When Stephen Harper steps down as Prime Minister (something he shows no signs of doing), a Premier of Alberta who lived a brief life in power will not be an attractive proposition.

As for Doug Horner, he is clearly seen by many to be running the Government of Alberta in all but name right now. Whether he can secure the leadership after the demise of the Premier we will have to wait and see. But we can be sure of a fight. Ted Morton is alive and well and starting to appear on screen and stage and others who left the party stand by to return once the Redford regime enters history. It will not be a cake walk.

One reason for this is the presence of Danielle Smith. The leader of the Wild Rose must think she has died and gone to heaven. She watches the progressive (sic) conservative party implode in front of her and simply draws attention to their failures, smiles, and observes. Her loss at the last election has enabled her to regroup and refocus in a way that positions her as Redford’s natural successor as Premier. Assuming she can detox her party of the wild elements and make it more rose like, she will more likely win than lose.

What we are not witnessing is a serious and substantial conversation about economics, public policy and evidence based decisions. Take education, for example. Will laying off some 1,500 to 2,000 teachers, cancelling investments in innovation (e.g. the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement), moving to merit pay (which has no merit) and asking teachers without a contract to do more with less will really improve educational outcomes and increase student engagement? Who in their right mind thinks that seeing teachers “as the problem” rather than excessive management spending (over seven hundred people in the Department of Education and significant numbers in central office staffing in Edmonton and Calgary Public Schools), over control and reporting requirements by Government, bureaucratic accountability systems and a curriculum that is no longer fit for purpose shows imaginative leadership for our world-class school system?

Its time to rethink Alberta and to have an imagination conversation not just about economics, but about the kind of Alberta the worlds need to see, I don’t see this Government as interested in such a conversation. Closed minds don’t open to challenge.

Coal is Back

According to James Hanson, climate warmist and chief prophet of doom, coal is the single biggest danger to the planet and our survival. He called coal fired power plants “factories of death” and has suggested that the continued use of existing coal fired energy, never mind expansion, would  set the planet on a course for an ice-free state, with sea level 75 meters higher than at present. He concluded that coal is the single largest threat to the future of the planet (1)

Current installed and actively used coal fired power plants is substantial and, world wide, they are set to expand with an additional 1,401,275 megawatts of coal fired power to be produced in the period 2013-2015. India and China between them account for over 1 million megawatts of new facilities in this time (2).

The primary reason for this is the industrialization of China and India and the expansion of industry in the emerging economies. Just as coal fired the industrial revolution in the West, so it is firing the emerging economies and their dash for growth.

Interestingly, in Europe some of this expansion is displacing renewable energy. Germany is a good example. Following the tsunami in Japan, Germany made a decision to close all of its nuclear facilities. While it was hoping to replace nuclear with renewables, the cost of doing so are substantial: energy prices have risen so high in Germany because of renewables that companies are moving to lower energy cost jurisdictions. German firms and policy makers have realized that, as the average energy cost rise relative to other countries, Germany becomes  less competitive. When  a  country less competitive, it tends to use less oil. The extra oil tends to go to a more competitive country, and may help raise coal usage – 12,600 megawatts of coal power is under construction in Germany, driven by energy economics. Power utilities in Germany, on average, lose €11.70 when they burned gas to make a megawatt of electricity, but earn €14.22 per MW when they burned coal.

Most of eastern Europe is also expanding coal use – especially Poland, the Ukraine and Russia. The amount of electricity generated from coal is rising at annualized rates of as much as 50% in some European countries, according to the International Energy Agency.

In North America the situation is very different. At its peak, in 1988, coal provided 60% of North America’s electricity. Even in 2010, when the shale-gas boom was well under way, it still accounted for 42%. By the middle of 2012, though, gas and coal were roughly neck-and-neck, each with around a third of power generation. With new shale gas finds and improving technologies, coal will continue its decline as a major source of energy. 

Coal, natural gas and shale gas are competitively priced, abundant and proven commodities. While each has environmental consequences, the shine is going from wind power and solar power due to costs, reliability and performance – we are at peak renewables in terms of their attractiveness from a policy and practice point of view. In these conditions, conventional energy sources become attractive. We will see the continuing expansion of coal use globally.

A key factor in these developments is the inability of governments to focus on energy policies and strategies that secure the competitiveness of nations balanced with environmental responsibilities. As Roger Pielke Jr, climate change policy specialist based in Denver, suggests: economic needs always trump climate change policies, as we can see in the European Union and US at this time. With unemployment high, economic growth slow and structural challenges to the developed economies of the world largely unresolved, energy strategy will be to maintain low cost energy and to minimize cost impacts of energy on firms and consumers. Emissions targets, renewable subsidies and plans for renewable expansion will be sacrificed in the name of economic growth and necessity. Shale gas, natural gas and coal are attractive energy forms in this reality. Coal will continue to see a renaissance as an energy source.

James Hansen, now in his seventy first year, will end his career convinced that the world is doomed. He is like that – a pessimist. Coal will be his nemesis.

  

Sources

1. James Hanson – see http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/15/james-hansen-power-plants-coal

2. See http://climatedepot.com/a/19413/Global-map-of-planned-coal-fired-capacity-tells-a-story-This-Map-tells-us-pretty-clearly-where-economies-are-going-to-be-expanding

The Fiscal Cliff Shows What the US is Good At - Avoiding Real Issues

Whatever happens in the House of Representatives, Congress and the White House have just made something explicit and powerfully clear: the United States has no leadership.

The “solution” which 89 Senators supported earlier today is no solution at all. Hailing it as a “victory”, as one commentator has said, would be like congratulating an arsonists for temporarily dampening “a fire he himself had created”. The deal pushes the problem down the road and does not deal with the core challenges which the US faces – the lack of demand and high unemployment. All it does it make modest adjustments to taxes and does not at all tackle the lack of competitiveness and growth evident in the US economy.

Why is this? There are several reasons, but the key is the fact that the republican party has lost the plot. They can no longer speak with any authority about the economy, since their prime agenda is totally clear: (a) support the richest people at all costs since, they appear to believe with the fervor of a cult, it’s the rich people that create growth; (b) cut the “undeserving” out of the economy by reducing their entitlements; (c) reduce social spending at all costs, no matter what the impact is on the most vulnerable; and (d) do not raise taxes. All this is based on two unproven economic ideas: trickle-down economics, which has been shown to be a crock, and a belief in the eventual return of the confidence fairy.

They are focused on government debt, despite the demonstrable fact that the two largest components of the debt are spending on defence (mainly due to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which the Republicans started) and the decline in revenues due to the lack of demand and unemployment. Some estimates put the structural debt figures at around just 2% of debt. They don’t focus on revenues, since new tax levels will affect their primary support network.

On the democratic side, they are also unfocused. They do not understand what they now need to do to grow the economy and stimulate demand. In fact, they are running in response to the republican agenda and have no clear agenda of their own.

Which is where the issue of leadership comes in. President Obama is not a leader we can admire. He is a good speaker, but leadership and rhetoric are two different things. Leaders show courage, determination, clarity and insight and he doesn’t exactly exude these qualities. [For the record, Mitt Romney wasn’t event on the leader board in terms of politics – “binders full of women”, “why don’t aeroplan windows open?” and “46% of Americans are…”. Don’t get me started on Paul Ryan!].

So what they agreed on is to increase taxes for all Americans and to hit those earning $450,000 or more harder than was originally planned. They then agreed not to deal with the cliff at all, but to make it into a Mountain which they have between now and March to climb. Worse, the deal makes the debt bigger not smaller.

Not a deal, not a compromise but a shambles. No leadership emerged anywhere in the house, senate or white house and non will be found between now and March.

The Missing in Action Premier Redford

While it is early in her mandate, Premier Alison Redford is clearly one of the most promising premiers we have had. Accomplished human rights lawyer, well travelled and articulate and well able to understand a complex file and get to the “heart of the matter” quickly.

But she is not emerging as a leader who can command respect and enforce discipline in her caucus. By all accounts, caucus is fractious, having never really warmed to the Premier -many of the “old guard” having backed others for the leadership. Promises made at the election are not being kept and decision-making is both slow and cumbersome. Leadership, de facto, is coming from the Provincial Treasurer, who himself has leadership ambitions. From the outside looking in, this does not look like a healthy or smart government that is willing to think and act strategically and reach out to the progressive constituencies that supported her initial vision for courage and change.

This is a shame, since it showed a great deal of promise – talented new members of cabinet, new Deputy Ministers and new approaches to “old problems”.  But the Government keeps losing the plot.

Take one file: the negotiations for a new teachers contract. These began under Dave Hancock, moved to Thomas Lukaszuk and then to Jeff Johnson. No wonder the Alberta Teachers’ Association is frustrated. The disagreement between the Government, School Boards and the ATA is focused not on pay but on the conditions of teaching practice which are students’ learning environments.

The ATA want a limit on the number of hours teachers work and for this time to be spent largely on either developing lesson plans and curriculum for students or in teaching and assessment activities – not on administrivia (or ministrivia, which it largely is). The School Boards have been whipped up to fear this reasonable ask on the grounds of unreasonable costs (meaning money, not health costs, social costs or lost learning opportunities). They suggest that they have been told that the ask will bankrupt many smaller jurisdictions, leading to Board amalgamations.

Prodded on by the a few well-positioned trustees and so-called ‘special advisers’ the Government has filtered this reasonable ask in terms of: (a) “teachers will not engage in curriculum reform unless they get paid for it”; and (b) teachers want to teach in exactly the same way for the same time every where, no matter what the location conditions are – no flexibility.

This tells us that listening is a real challenge for Government and the School Boards. What the ATA is saying is very simple. It is normal for a contract of employment to make clear how much time a person is expected to work in exchange for pay. True, some contracts have the phrase “no fixed hours of work” in them (my last contract did), but there was also a clause that said “normally”, a professional staff member was expected to work  42 hours a week. What is unreasonable about this? Nothing. What teachers are saying is that job expectation creep has been occurring to the point at which the average now working 56 hours a week, over a third of this time devoted to extraneous tasks such a supervision, ‘ministrivia’ and other distractions. They want this nonsense to stop. Fair enough.

                                                                                                                                                                      

The second thing the ATA is saying is also very simple. If we are moving from a curriculum which specifies some 1,326 objectives to be achieved in around 185 days of school time for Grade 7 to a situation in which the Grade 7 curriculum will have, for the sake of argument, 50 objectives, but that the teacher is tasked with taking these are making them meaningful with local content and context and school based curriculum, then they need time to prepare and develop this content and teaching resources.  If they are also expected to develop the assessment for learning rubrics for this new work, this too takes time and this all should be part of their work time (who develops assessment rubrics as a hobby?).  Sound reasonable? I think so.

If there are 42 hours of available teacher time, then perhaps 30% of this should be spent preparing and 60% engaging directly with students and 10% on administrivia. The trouble is that this will require boards to look at their staffing models and probably hire more teachers. It would also require trustees to account for where provincial funds targeted for classrooms are actually going. Some reports suggest that as much as 20% of high school funding is being clawed back to be administered by ever-growing  school district bureaucracies.

And then we have Doug Horner saying that we can’t afford the resources needed to truly address the education challenges we face in Alberta. Rather than a bold vision and courage we get pat phrases like “ this is a time of austerity the money running out” and “we need to borrow money.” And so on.

What he is not saying is that we should rethink our whole approach to Provincial finance and recognize that we have a revenue problem as well as an inability to control spending. This is the tale told to doctors, teachers and anyone other than MLA’s who are looking for reasonable conditions of practice.

After twenty months, the teachers were the first to give up on the Provincial talks and return to local bargaining in the sixty two school boards where the contractual authority actually rests. They did ask the Premier to get engaged and settle this, but she distracted by her own issues and thinks that her Ministers can get the job done, which they cant.

So, as we say, we have an “en passé”.  What is at stake is the ability of teachers to act professionally to transform education and to do so with dignity and support. That is the ATA view.

The Governments view is different. They see the stakes in terms of power and control. If they accede to the ATA position, they are recognizing that teachers are the most important ingredient in the education system, not the Department or the Minister.  Its about power and control – who makes decisions about how students should be taught and when.

The Premier was elected, in part at least, because of commitments she made about education and the future of schooling. She was going to be an education Premier. So much for that. She will be known as the “no show” Premier – leaving Ministers to both create a mess and dig themselves deeper into it, all encouraged by short sighted fiscal policies which impair Alberta’s opportunities to continue to lead the world in education.

In Canada, it is a basic lesson of public policy 101 that real reform key in health care and education has only succeeded when provincial premiers set the agenda and engage citizens in a bold vision. In Alberta, what we have now is a new Minister doing his best but surrounded by a small band of advisers who seem willing to lead him over the precipice with Alberta teachers. On the health care file, Alberta doctors are already at the edge of a similar fiscally induced cliff.

We know what needs to be done. Key education partners, increasingly pushed to the side,  have provided some bold new ideas. (see here for guidance). It’s just that the Government doesn’t want change – rather they need to feel in control. It is their control needs and failure to listen that is getting in the way of a just settlement. It is sad to see. It will also do serious damage to a Premier that has great promise but will now be in great peril if she fails to personally engage education and health care as her legacy. After all, its what Albertan’s care most about.

Doha, Duh - COP18 and the Climate Change Business

Next week thousands will descends on Doha, Qatar, for the eighteens conference of the parties (COP18) - the supreme United Nations supported body governing the treaties and international agreements related to climate change. Building on the decisions at COP16 in 2010, they hope to move towards the final details of an agreement to succeed Kyoto to come into orce in 2015 and to settle the mechanisms by which the $100 billion annual fund by 2020  for climate mitigation will be both collected and distributed. The ultimate purpose is to keep climate change to below 2C by the end of the century. The meetings begin on 26th November and are due to end on December 7th. This is the third similar meeting this year - preliminary meetings involving the one hundred and ninety five countries were held earlier in Bonn and Bangkok.

So far, the results of these mammoth meetings are that CO2 emissions continue to rise, despite various Governments adopting unilateral and multilateral positions on climate related policies. While some agreements have been reached, for example with respect to the worlds forests, various groups of nations cannot agree on the basics of a deal - they keep "kicking the can" down the road.

The good news is that climate change remains a modest challenge for the world. In the last one hundred years, there has been warming of around 0.75C. Yet between 1998 and 2008, the earths climate remained stable and the earth cooled in 2011. Despite dire warnings, sea levels are rising modestly and the frequency of extreme weather events and droughts is declining. While we are seeing sea ice extent declining in the Arctic, we have complex explanations connected to wind and currents rather than just the CO2 is rising argument - a difficult argument to make, since Antarctic ice is expanding.

The fundamental purpose of these meetings is political. The focus is on government action, governance of global institutions and the transfer of wealth from developed to developing nations. The meetings have little or nothing to do with climate change - this is the veneer used to explore other matters.

Let us understand the political context. The Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) - the part of the UN behind COP18 - talked this earlier this month about the work of COP18. Christina Figueres language focused on the need for "guided transformation from a centralized policy perspective". Her argument was that there needs to be global governance for policy and that this should be acceptable because it is "based on science". She wants to affect the lives of everyone because "science tells us to".

Science tells us nothing of the sort. The science of climate change is in its infancy and we have a limited understanding of how climate actually works. Some of what we thought we knew is wrong and some of what is said to be known is also wrong. For example, in the lead up to Doha several of the key players at COP18, who are government representatives, not scientists, made a link between Hurricane Sandy and Climate Change. The UN's own so-called authoritative body can find no such link between extreme weather events and climate change and those who have spent their professional scientific career studying such matters also are unable to make this connection. In fact, hurricanes in the US are less frequent than they used to be and drought occurs no more frequently than it did sixty years ago.

What Susan Figueres should have said, so we would know, is that "carefully selected science" which supports the policies governments wish to pursue, both nationally and globally, will be used to inform policy". Put simply: "we are in favour of policy driven evidence produced by science".

This too is a strecth. A great many of the references in the 2007 International Panel on Climate Change assessment were not scientific publications in peer reviewed journals. They were unpublished articles, magazine articles, pamphlets from environmental campaign organizations. So the term "science" should be modified too - perhaps "kind of scientific-ish" would be more accurate.

We should not expect much to come from the Doha COP18. In the last several COP meetings, it has been backroom deals at the "last minute" which has made the COP appear successful, when in fact in each case they have delayed, postponed or kicked into the sidelines, the issues they are dealing with. While occassionally something happens - the agreement on deforestation, for example - this is unusual rather than the norm.

We can expect the United Nations to make a bid for a new governance agency and new funds to go with it. They made this request at COP17 and it has been part of the conversation for some time. The "front" for this is the need to administer the $100 billion a year global fund. 

We can also expect significant disputes betweeen the developed world (the G8), the developing world (especially India and China) and the Small Island States. This is part of the drama of these events. Some scientists will claim that the end of the world is neigh and we should treat these scientists seriously, but ask them to openly share their raw data with the world. That usually shuts them up (or sends them to their lawyers).

There will be interesting side shows - Canada will be vilified, Lord Monckton will be critized and Bjorn Lomborg will be ostracized - these too are normal events.

What no one will talk about is the fact that none of the decisions made to reduce CO2 emissions by anyone are having any impact or that the data from direct observation doesnt support the "science". These are "no, no" conversations.