Image by Foreign and Commonwealth Office


'Value serious engagement. This isn't it.' - Twitter lends itself to short and succinct messages.

Ed Miliband - the man behind this tweet and Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change - was dismissing allegations that he's wrecked the UK's credibility ahead of the world's most important environmental negotiations.

The World Development Movement led the charge. In a statement released under the headline 'Ed Miliband's energy policy leaves UK's credibility at Copenhagen in tatters', their director, Deborah Doane, asserted:

 

'Ed Miliband today has shattered the UK's credibility at the Copenhagen summit by going ahead with disastrous plans for new coal... He has acknowledged that carbon capture technology may not work, but nonetheless hasn't introduced a safety net to protect the climate if this unproven technology fails... This policy flies in the face of recommendations from the government's own climate advisors... [It] will continue to increase our climate debt to the world's poorest people. And in turn, this will lock in greater inequality and injustice...'

When OneClimate tweeted the story Mr Miliband was quick to reply: 'Not serious to say 'UK's credibility at Copenhagen in tatters' when we have the world's most environmentally stringent policy''.

From the perspective of a politician who is working tirelessly to ensure our energy and climate policy is the best it can be, maybe this feels like a natural response to such direct criticism. But there's a problem.

Even if every other nation in the world followed the UK's example we'd still be likely to hit a global temperature rise of four degrees. Mr Miliband knows what this means, because he recently launched the MET Office's brilliant 'Climate Impact Map' showing the 'catastrophic effects that will result if the world fails to limit the global temperature rise to two degrees...'

The lives of millions of people are under threat due to climate change - a fact that doesn't sit comfortably with Mr Miliband's dismissive response. For all these people, the credibility of current UK climate policy has absolutely nothing to do with the UK's position relative to that of other governments. They don't care if its policy is better than France's or German's or Japan's. And here lies the problem. Neither should you, Ed.

Earlier this week, Saleemul Huq summed up the reason why climate talks are faltering by saying: 'this is not a problem of individual countries... it doesn't really matter what negotiators do for their own country now if the planet is destroyed... they are negotiating a deal for the planet and many of them haven't understood the magnitude of that responsibility yet'.

Perhaps if we wanted to tweet that message to our political representative, it would look something like the following: 'Would value serious engagement, Ed. This isn't it.'