Hello my name is David Ronsman and this is Talking Politics. Today, an extra episode as part of our climate series,

we're talking to David King who was Chief Scientific Advisor to the Blair and Brown Governments,

he was Britain's Climate Ambassador at the Paris Climate Accords, and we're talking about Extinction Rebellion,

re-freezing the polls and saving the planet.

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forward slash talking.

We're just a few months over three years since the Paris Climate Conference and the Paris Climate Accords,

and we're going to talk about what's changed since then.

But if you just take us back because you were heavily involved, you were there, and you were instrumental in what came out of that conference.

At the time, how big a success did you feel it was? How important an event did the Paris Climate Agreement feel in December 2015?

It was a giant step forward because we had been struggling for so long to get an international agreement that had any bite to it at all.

So if I take you back to Copenhagen, where the agreement was all built around the Kyoto Principle,

which goes back to the beginning of these discussions, I wrote a blog before and it ended up as an editorial in several newspapers saying Copenhagen could not be a success.

The reason was very simple.

The United States President, as much as he wanted to sign up, and that was Obama, couldn't possibly do it because it was a top-down agreement that was trying to be reached,

in which every country would be told how much they should reduce their emissions by over what period of time,

and his Senate and Congress had not approved. In fact, I think there were only ever two votes in favor of reaching the Kyoto Agreement.

So we had a complete failure in Copenhagen, which caused quite a big setback for the climate change process.

So we had to rebuild after Copenhagen, and we get to the point of Paris that we had to bite our lips and move away from a top-down agreement to an agreement in which each country was given the right to determine what its contribution would be to reducing emissions of greenhouse.

And this meant the President of the United States could come on board. We all knew that, and it was the only reason we abandoned the top-down process.

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