This is a shortened version of a piece originally published on Dan Smith's blog site.

It's worth lingering a second or two over the extraordinary extent, the depths of the failure at the December climate talks in Copenhagen.

In December 2007, at the Bali climate conference, the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change set out on a course that two years later was to bring the world a new agreement on reducing global warming and responding to climate change.

Earlier this year it became clear that this objective was extremely ambitious. By the beginning of October the prospects of success were dim and in early November it was clear that the conference would fail to achieve that first ambition.

With a month to go, therefore, the ambition was scaled down and the idea was to create a politically binding agreement, whatever that is supposed to mean.

The actual result was that 190 governments plus the European Union acknowledged that five of their number - Brazil, China, India, South Africa and the US - had made a statement called "the Copenhagen accord" in which they agreed it would be a good idea if countries would restrain carbon emissions.

Some measures were suggested but there was no agreement along the lines of all governments now binding themselves and each other to specific actions. No binding targets were set. Governments are left to carry out their own policies, aiming for carbon emissions to peak as soon as possible.

Financial figures (for assisting developing countries) are mentioned and a mechanism for spending the money but nothing that is either firm or final.

Prospects worsening

Prospects for the global climate and thus for the majority of the world's population have just got worse.

Climate Action Tracker's independent estimate of what all the commitments and offers made at and before Copenhagen add up to is that they take the world to a one-in-four chance of exceeding an average temperature increase of 4 degrees Centigrade by the end of this century. That is unimaginably bad. The generally accepted target before, at and after Copenhagen is 2 degrees by 2050. The target wanted by small island states and some other developing countries is 1.5 degrees.

There simply is no good way to spin this. It is not a breakthrough (U.S. President Barack Obama) and it is not even a good first step (U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown), (a) because the first step has already been taken at Bali two years ago, and (b) because it involves no forward movement.

A bad way to spin it is to point out, as US climate envoy Todd Stern has done, that the Copenhagen accord is supported by over 100 countries. Yes, that is, by not much more than 50 per cent of the governments present in Copenhagen. And tellingly, the Financial Times reports that of the five governments that signed the accord, two - Brazil and South Africa - have now disowned it, with Brazil calling it disappointing and South Africa refusing to defend a non-binding agreement.

It is, of course, necessary to look ahead now and see what can be done.

Reasons for Copenhagen's failure

There's been a lot in the media about the reasons for Copenhagen's failure, with charges being laid at the door of the US for inaction before the conference, and China for being obstructive during it, and the EU for being just generally ineffective.

But the blame game misses the point. Copenhagen did not cause but, rather, reflected failure. And what that means is that rather than focus on whether China really did snub Obama and annoy German Chancellor Angela Merkel, or even whether Obama could have come to Copenhagen with something better in his pocket, we need to look at what went wrong as a whole because the international machinery for dealing with the issue of climate change is broken.

The whole business of bargaining, trade-offs, holding negotiating cards close to your chest, threatening to walk out, interrupting the conference president, raising annoying points of order, haggling over the fine points of an agreement, arranging side meetings to which only a few are invited, pushing close to the deadline so as to limit your counterparts' room for manoeuvre - all of these and other tactics seen at and before Copenhagen are suitable for negotiating on issues of national interest. I don't think they can be fruitful when what is at stake is global interest.

It is also a problem with negotiations that the one who is prepared to hold out against an agreement for longest and create the most problems for a smooth process is often likely to get the deal that is closest what she or he wants.

The urge to compromise with spoilers in order to get them into the fold of the agreement means that even a determined majority may find they are moving the terms of the agreement towards the preference of the hold-outs. In many cases that does not matter but in the case of climate change it does matter a great deal. Compromising on temperature rise in order to allow a heavy emitter to sign up would essentially destroy the point of the agreement.

Strategy to win over hold-outs needed

What is needed is a strategy to address the core problem of the hold-outs - governments holding out against an ambitious climate deal, even if it is fair, because they see it as restricting their own national economic development - because compromising with the hold-outs risks changing a good agreement into a bad one.

The best solution to the problem of hold-outs is for there to be no hold-outs. For this reason, an essential part of any strategy for moving forward after Copenhagen is to keep on making and winning the argument that climate change is a real, current, solvable problem.

But we must also accept that the argument is not going to be won everywhere simply as a matter of principle and conviction. There is considerable scepticism in some very important quarters and there is a need to develop a strategy for that.

Copenhagen has shown that the hold-out problem is pressing. Persuasion is important but something more hard-nosed is also required.

Perhaps a change from adversarial negotiations to problem-solving talks is a start.

In the climate context, the aim of a problem-solving approach is to bring together enough players of enough economic weight, with enough commitment to an ambitious climate agreement and enough sense of their own common ground, so that they can explore the possibilities, the problems, the connections, and the prospects for cutting through the knots of complexity to a deal.

With common ground, there is a chance that there will be the open-mindedness required to explore ideas and identify solutions. With the economic weight, there is a chance that the process would become attractive for other governments not initially committed to this way of doing things.

Critical mass of problem solvers?

It requires a critical mass to get started. There are a number of governments whose weight and policy record on climate suggests they could start things rolling - for example, the EU, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Mexico, Norway and South Korea.

These together account for a little less than half of world economic output. Were it possible as the process unfolded also to attract the United States, the combined economic weight of the climate problem-solvers would be just on 70 percent of world output. And there would be many others that would also want to join in, both as a matter of principle and so as not to be left out.

When the problem-solvers have arrived at a solution that they agree will work, they should agree it and begin implementation. The obvious objection is that that would mean powerful players were not part of the agreement. How could this work?

It has been an unquestioned assumption of climate change policy that since the problem is global, so must the solution be, and since the solution must be global, so must the process be. The experience of Copenhagen suggests to me that we can and must examine that assumption.

So the question that is actually being asked here is, 'How might it be possible for an agreement to be meaningful if it is arrived at by a process that might leave, for example, China, India and Russia standing outside its scope?'

The answer is: by making it attractive for China, India, Russia and other countries to come inside its scope without letting it be possible for them to play a hold-out role.

Plan must be attractive now

The substance of climate policy at present is to focus on cutting greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the negative changes that will unfold until emission cuts have their desired effects. It sounds economically unattractive especially in a recession and its after-effects. It sounds like loss.

Problem-solving might therefore start by recognising that the path of being responsible about the environment has to be as attractive now as the path of being irresponsible about it. Benefit today is what will win the doubters over, not abstract future costs that are avoided.

Climate policy should have no sense of self-sacrifice nor of deferred benefits. So while there has to be a rigourous programme for cutting emissions, there also has to be a programme for economic growth, jobs and improvement in the quality of life.

This means properly investing in green technologies, especially in transport, energy and construction.

This investment needs to be both in what are now called mitigation technologies (reducing greenhouse gas emissions) and adaptation (dealing with the impact of unavoidable climate change). There is considerable crossover between them.

The climate problem-solvers, representing at least 45 percent of world economic output and possibly 70 percent if the US participates, can generate an enormous market for this investment.

Green infrastructure, energy and transport can be financed through joint stock companies, with government support all the way through the life of the project, starting from government funding for basic research, through to tax support for start-ups and continuing tax incentives.

This combined climate and economic policy arrangement is the way to get sustainable progress on a low carbon pathway.

Getting the stragglers on board

With the scale of this market, there would be strong reasons for developing countries, especially those with ultra-strong export-led growth, to come into the arrangement unless they could free-ride on it. The way to stop free-riding is by legislating tariffs on international trade on all countries except those that have signed up to the package of green growth and cuts in emissions.

Countries that want a less ambitious climate deal than is required for global well-being - or, to be ultra-fair, less ambitious than countries such as the EU believe is required for global well-being - would calculate for themselves the relative costs of being in the system and being outside it.

I am not presenting this as the finished idea. This is a bare outline, to see if makes sense. But proposals for moving ahead after Copenhagen have to have this level of ambition. Just trying to do more or less the same thing better next time round is all too likely to fail for the same reasons as this time and could well fail worse. As bad as it is to have no agreement it will indeed be worse to have an agreement that compromises too far with the hold-outs and sets inadequate targets.

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