Having “saved the world economy” in Act 1, Act 2 appears to be the no less thorny task of saving the world itself.

The Chancellor has forced climate finance to the top of the agenda at breakfast tomorrow. The UK/EU plan is for finance worth $100bn per year from 2020, half of which will be raised from the private sector through carbon market mechanisms.

The controversial bit is the other half. Which governments should pay for carbon abatement, mitigation, and percolation of green technologies to fast-growing economies so that they may prosper and grow using the least carbon possible?

The existing developed countries, AKA ‘the North’, AKA ‘the rich’, are responsible for 75 per cent of historic carbon emissions on this planet.

They are by far the cause of the current climate change challenge.

However, as the Chancellor will point out in a speech tonight, 90 per cent of future emissions will come from the emerging and developing countries, such as Brazil, Russia, India and China. The EU plan calls for some sharing of the burden of this 50 billion per year between historic and future polluters.

But here at St Andrews the Chinese in particular are saying No. There had been an attempt to do the heavy lifting work here in preparation for the Copenhagen summit.

The Danish prime minister will gatecrash this meeting alongside the British one. But tonight, all hope of a climate change finance deal here appears to be disappearing. We’ll know more after breakfast.

* The Chinese know all about breakfasts at these summits. When it was the G7 rich man’s club that ruled the roost, and many were complaining about China’s exchange rate policy, they did invite Chinese officials to attend as an observer.

But they were booted out after breakfast whilst the G7 crafted communique after communique that criticised the Renminbi policy. On climate change and elsewhere the BRIC countries are making their voice heard loud.

Brazil’s current policy of taxing capital flows would have been laughed out of a G7 meeting, but will politely accepted tomorrow.

The other major agenda item is building a sustainable world economic system.

Mervyn King has called the global imbalances, which I reported on from China using a dim sum table, the fuel behind the fire of the credit crunch.

The hope from G20 leaders is that the next leg of world growth will be sustainable and balanced, that North American won’t consume 30 per cent of the world’s output and will stop borrowing so much.

And that surplus countries like China will start spending more and stop accumulating three trillion dollar mountains of Forex reserves.

Very very interesting, but slightly academic.

A cynic might say that having “abolished boom and bust” in Britain, this is a rather lofty attempt to abolish boom and bust across the world. But it is heartening that one of the key geoeconomic lessons of this crisis is being learnt at the highest levels.

UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer says so; a senior EU negotiator says so; even the genially optimistic Energy and Climate Secretary Ed Miliband says so – telling the Commons: “The UN negotiations are moving too slowly and not going well.”

As one European delegate at this last round of talks before Copenhagen told me: “We’re out of time to agree a fully worked-up treaty.”

But they keep on going, these now very familiar faces at UN climate talks. They’re all here – climate campaigners, government officials, business and industry lobbyists.

Milling around, pressing flesh, bending ears, spreading rumours, buttonholing passing negotiators. A word changed here, a clause deleted there, each generates a frisson of excitement or depression; these are the bread and butter of climate change negotiations.

Now, there’s a lot of salvage work going on. The aim is a political agreement, one that is “politically binding” – though that’s something of a slippery concept.

Rich country negotiators and the hosts, the Danish government, say they want something with enough meat in it so Gordon Brown, President Lula of Brazil, who knows, even President Obama, et al can all turn up at the end of the Copenhagen talks and bask in the glory of being seen to save the planet, while leaving the details to be worked out by officials in yet more negotiations.

Negotiations that may take a further six months, though I’ve heard one insider say it could take up to a year.

The more optimistic government delegates – Britain among them – say they’re still pushing for a political agreement with real numbers in it – numbers for emissions cuts by developed countries, numbers for emissions restraint by developing countries, and numbers for the money the rich will pay to the poor to help them deal with the impacts of climate change.

But the frustration of the poor is growing – African nations walked out at the beginning of the week demanding the rich countries start talking turkey. That livened things up. And it has put the rich countries under the spotlight and forced them to start explaining exactly how their much-vaunted offers of targets for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions will actually work.

The problem is, a politically binding agreement can be watered down; it can be evaded and sidestepped. The less meat there is in, the greater wriggle room there is to water it down. And astute negotiators know that, which may explain the British ambition for real numbers in the agreement.

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More than one thing is happening to this little planet because of humankind. Yes – it seems to be heating up because of carbon/methane emissions. But consider our old friend oil for a moment, beyond being a culprit in that story.
Because oil is running out. Forget the old canard of peak oil and when we reach it. It is cheap oil which matters. Cheap oil which sustains the vast bulk of the way we live, move, communicate, travel, work and above all – eat.
 
And cheap oil is going. Could already have gone. Just when the Chinese and Indian middle classes want little cars, not bikes. And meat, not noodles.
 
Yes the oil companies are trumpeting the new Gulf of Mexico finds – but what BP won’t tell you is how far below the surface that oil lies. It will make North Sea crude look like the black gold which oozed through the Kuwaiti desert sands just a few generations ago.
 
Even now in recessionary depths oil is at a 12 month high around $80 odd per barrel. It will go only one way from hereon in. It will pass 90 again, then 100 and so on. It will not be a blip. It will be life. And what price then your kiwi fruit in Safeway? Your EasyJet weekend in Prague? Your bunch of flowers plucked only yesterday in Kenya?
 
Well – they’ll all still be around, for a while, but will get increasingly expensive in a world which gets increasingly more local. Don’t believe me – ask people who really make it their business like, well, like Walmart for instance.
 
These people know the days of buying five shirts for your child’s school uniform for a few quid because they’ve been shipped in by bulk carrier (powered by cheap bunker fuel) are beginning to end. They are now looking at really old fashioned things like local textile mills in the USA, close to stores.
 
How cheap can they go? Well a hell of a lot cheaper than now but never as cheap as China. Cheap enough though to stay in the game when China has fallen off the market.
 
One example for you but so goes the world. And the lesson for Copenhagen? Well in a world of soaring demand but increasingly expensive base product, the end-user will pay at the pump, at the airline desk, at the shipping line.
 
And the implications for Copenhagen – there will be forces out there which will cut the output of oil burning emissions rather more quickly than governments are able to do. What needs to happen though is serious planning for this, rather than unrealistic and divisive whimsy about cutting carbon emissions by unreachable percentages.
 
And yes, you’ve got it. Much planning and hot air is being expended on the former theory – almost no serious governmental planning is being done on the latter, pressing reality.
 
The greener world will come because the length of a drilling bore from an oil rig and the craving for what comes out, just as much as the limited powers of politicians divided to pieces – as ever – by special interests, votes, sustaining power and the clash of values between waning western economies and emerging eastern ones.

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It’s a map of what the world might look like in the coming decades if serious commitments to limit greenhouse gasses aren’t agreed at the global climate talks in Copenhagen in December.

It’s a bit broad-brush if you’re seriously looking for where to by that place in the sun, but in terms of what a 4 degree centigrade increase in global temperatures might mean for our globe as a whole it’s depressingly instructive.

This 4 degrees isn’t a arbitrary figure. The amount of carbon we’ve added to the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution has committed us to at least 0.6 degrees of warming. If leaders commit to tough targets at Copenhagen we might JUST avoid an increase in 2 degrees sometime this century.

But if we do nothing (which is, broadly speaking, what we are doing) 4 degrees is the level of warming climate scientists have agreed we will see by the end of the century. If anything it could be more than 4 degrees and earlier than 2100.

Interestingly the new map shows how the world won’t warm up evenly like a well steamed pudding. The thin crust of land will heat up more quickly than the deep, constantly circulating ocean. Higher latitudes like the Arctic, will have larger temperature increases than closer to the equator. The average land temperature will be 5.5 degrees higher than when Columbus sailed.

As a result the map tries to broadly display what that might happen where. Be it changes in water availability, falling food production,drought, the risk of forest fire and sea level rise. Cheery stuff this is not.

The map was unveiled by David (Foreign Secretary) and Ed (Climate Change Secretary) Miliband today.The unveiling formed part of a new climate change exhibition at the Science Museum in London entitled “prove it”. One of the less-than-gripping-even-for-the-science-museum exhibits is a large pile of coal.

But this is a pile of coal I hope is still there to take my grand children to see. It’s what curators are calling the “trillionth tonne.” Sometime this century mankind will squirt the trillionth tonne of carbon once locked up in fossil fuels into the atmosphere.

If we exceed that figure runaway climate change (temperature increases beyond 2 degrees) is a near certainty.

If, like me, you’re an anxious type and like to keep an eye on things climate modellers at Oxford University have created this tool http://trillionthtonne.org/ so you can watch our climate future changing before your very eyes.

Gordon Brown has warned of “climate catastrophe” unless the world can come to some sort of agreement to tackle global warming.

In the East Midlands town of Kettering people don’t need convincing climate change is real, they’ve woken up and smelled the carbon.

The United Nations came to Kettering to ask 100 of its ‘global citizens’ what kind of climate deal they want the world to cut in Copenhagen.

Their verdict was harsh, but fair.

Harsh, because they want industrialised countries like ours to cut carbon emissions in half.

And fair, because they agreed developing economies like Brazil and India should be allowed time to catch up, before they’re expected to think about being green.

But when it comes to doing their bit, people in Kettering are diligently filling up their recycling boxes and turning the TV off at the wall and yet the prospect of a really green lifestyle is a turn-off.

Almost half (45 per cent) are against any rise in the price of petrol or electricity,in the rest of the world only 20 per cent of people objected. Even Americans are willing to pay more for petrol than we are. 

The message from Kettering was that they’re not going to pay into government’s low carbon economy until they see the benefits, things like cheaper solar panels for their homes or proper public transport.

The climate change secretary Ed Miliband says he’s going to “strain every sinew” to get the climate deal the world needs. But clinching the deal in Copenhagen could be a cinch compared to selling the green revolution at home.

Developing countries – from those with big, fast-growing economies like China and India to tiny Pacific island states that might vanish if sea levels rise – want the wealthy Western economies like America and Europe to demonstrate they accept responsibility for their historic fossil-fuelled industrial growth that’s caused the rise in greenhouse gas emissions we’ve seen so far.

So they want the rich countries to make legally-binding commitments to reduce their emissions significantly. And they want to see the numbers.

For their part, the rich countries want the bigger, fast-developing countries to make commitments to curtail their emissions as they grow their economies. China now emits more CO2 than the USA but absolute emissions levels are misleading. Per capita, every American is responsible for as much CO2 as five Chinese. Developing countries say they need financial help to put their economies on a low-carbon path. And again, they want to see the numbers.

But right now, in spite of all the political rhetoric of “urgency”, the chance of a planet-saving deal in Copenhagen looks remote.

The biggest stumbling block is the likely absence of a US Climate & Energy Bill before the Copenhagen meeting. Only just arrived in the Senate (where Waxman-Markey has become Boxer-Kerry), it is not at the top of Barack Obama’s agenda, who is mired in his domestic health reforms. There is no guarantee it will be passed before Copenhagen.

If it isn’t, the lack of a firm US domestic commitment to greenhouse gas reductions, signed into law, seriously undermines the US position at the talks and removes any incentive on developing countries to agree to anything.

There are some numbers on the table – from the European Union, for example, which has offered to cut emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 (based on 1990 levels) and to go for 30 per cent if there’s a deal in Copenhagen.

Developing countries too have made significant moves. China’s President Hu has promised “notable” reductions in his country’s energy intensity (but no numbers yet); India is pushing ahead with projects like a massive solar energy programme. But countries like China and India still want a sign, like the passage of the US bill, that the biggest, wealthiest country on the planet is genuinely willing to take action on climate change.

We’ve come a long way since the Bush era; the USA is now engaged in the process. But my best guess is still that in late December I will stand in front of a camera in Copenhagen to tell you that the world has fudged it, has missed its self-imposed deadline.

There will be face-saving rhetoric; perhaps an agreement to agree numbers as soon as possible, probably in further negotiations in 2010 once the US bill is passed. The fudge will be justified for the long term as “better delay for a short while to get a really robust deal than rush through one that’s too weak – get it right, rather than get it now”.

Deal or no deal? We’ll have to wait and see.