2015: the most crucial year for decades in the climate battle

This year, one of Britain’s leading green businessmen told me this week, “is going to be the most important year in the history of the world!” That may be pushing it a bit, but it will certainly be the most crucial for the environment in nearly a quarter of a century. In particular, it needs to be the one in which the green movement – now in its fifties – finally comes of age and concentrates on what it is for, rather than what it is against.

Two developments in particular – one well publicised, the other not – should force environmentalists, and the rest of us, to focus on developing solutions rather than grinding on about problems.

The well-known one is the attempt, at December’s Paris summit, to reach a new agreement on climate change, billed as the world’s last chance to avert dangerous global warming.

If it succeeds – and the odds still are that it will, despite the best efforts of the sclerotic UN negotiating process in Lima last month to drive some promising progress into the ground – it will be a bottom-up arrangement rather the kind of top-down approach that failed in Copenhagen in 2009. Rather than setting global limits on emissions and then trying to get governments to comply, Paris will rely on countries coming up with their own clean-up plans and then encouraging them to do more. This will place the onus on environmentalists and businesses, as well as governments, to come up with practical low-carbon solutions, rather than trying to browbeat others into doing more.

The second development in what promises to be the most decisive year for the planet since 1992, with its Rio Earth Summit, will be the worldwide adoption of the mind-numbingly titled Sustainable Development Goals at the UN General Assembly in New York in September, as a universal template for development up to 2030. It would be easy to dismiss the 17 proposed goals (and the 169 more detailed “targets” with them) as yet another aspirational, loftily worded but unattainable UN wishlist – were it not for the astonishing success of their predecessors.

When the Millennium Development Goals were similarly adopted 15 years ago, few would ever have imagined that the world would manage to meet the target of halving the proportion of people in dire poverty by 2015. But it did, and five years early. Governments also succeeded, again by 2010, in halving the proportion of people without safe drinking water, and have made remarkable progress on other fronts: slashing hunger and child mortality, educating both girls and boys, and beating back diseases like malaria and TB.

The big failure of the Millennium Development Goals has been on the environment: indeed, a weak green target was only added at the last minute when one of the key people drawing them up happened to bump into the then head of the UN Environment Programme.

The Sustainable Development Goals aim to go further, by integrating “the three dimensions of development – economic, social and environmental”. So, as well as vowing to finish the job on ending poverty and hunger, they will set targets, for example, for halting land degradation, creating marine reserves and cutting food waste.

These three dimensions are inseparable. Climate change threatens to do immense economic damage, and is already hitting some of the world’s poorest people: in time, development experts believe, it could undo the gains in prosperity of recent years and “make poverty permanent”. As productive land turns to dust, economies suffer and people go hungry. Tackling this issue would increase growth and affluence while protecting the planet.

Almost unnoticed in Britain, David Cameron has played a key part in preparing the goals, co-chairing a “high-level panel” with the presidents of Liberia and Indonesia. Yet this country is now trying to get the 17 goals cut to 10 or 12: that would certainly tighten them up, but would also (it is feared) emasculate their green dimension. It’s a shame, because the Prime Minister would otherwise be well placed to lead on both developments. He originally did more than any leader since Margaret Thatcher to drive climate change up the political agenda, and has gained international kudos for Britain’s aid increases.

If – and it is an “if” – the SDGs and a global climate agreement are adopted this year, the environmentalists will effectively have won their decades-long argument, and finally persuaded governments to act. But they’ll then need to accept the responsibility of working with them to put practical solutions in place. That, in turn, could begin a transformation towards low-carbon, resource-prudent prosperity – which might just make this one of history’s most important years, after all.

Banning leaded petrol has put the brakes on crime

Fifteen years ago on Thursday Britain stopped selling leaded petrol. Now almost everywhere has done so, with the exception of a few countries such as North Korea and the Yemen.

Those of us who campaigned for the removal of the toxic metal from our fuel knew that breathing it in damaged children’s brains. But we had no idea how destructive it really was. Studies since have linked it with ADHD, increased blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, premature ageing, physical stunting and – most surprisingly of all – increased crime: one of its effects is to make exposed children more aggressive and delinquent as adults.

An astonishing peer-reviewed UN study, carried out by the California State University, calculated that the phasing-out of leaded petrol had prevented 58 million crimes worldwide, and saved 1.2 million lives annually – 125,000 of them children’s. By totting up the costs of criminality and health damage, and adding in the financial losses brought about by lowered IQ, it came up with a global gain of an almost unbelievable $2.4 trillion every year.

Of course, at the time, its defenders objected that banning lead would cost far too much, gravely damaging the economy. How little things change …

It’s not only new year revellers who get out of their trees

Here’s a thought for anyone who overdid it on New Year’s Eve, and resolved the next morning that getting drunk is for the birds: you could be right.

Scientists at the Oregon Health and Science University have been fuddling finches to see what happens. “We showed up in the morning and mixed a bit of juice with six per cent alcohol and put it in their cages,” says Dr Christopher Olson. “At first we were thinking they wouldn’t drink on their own, because a lot of animals just won’t touch the stuff. But they seemed to be somewhat willing to consume it.”

The finches ended up with blood-alcohol levels at about the limit for driving in many states, and – like humans in a karaoke bar – had trouble singing, slurring their cheeps in “less organised” songs.

Indeed, birds often get wasted in the wild eating fermented berries, explains Dr Meghan Larivee of Environment Yukon. Recently some Bohemian waxwings had to be held in “drunk tanks” – adapted hamster cages – in the Canadian territory. Unable to fly or walk properly, they were so sloshed that they were indisputably out of their tree.