Osborne went considerably off the leash with his claims, saying that Labour secretly planned to raise income tax, and implying that civil servants had, in allowing the plans to be forged, given up something of their political impartiality. Stung, the servants told Osborne to drop the Hardy Boys schtick – the “secret plans” were actually in the public domain as part of the Budget, and the increase in income tax was tied to the ongoing growth in the economy.

He’s set in motion the kind of political Pokemon battle we get every election cycle, where each side fires its rhetorical magic at the other in turn, until one of them emerges the victor – so much for Osborne’s recent condemnation of electioneering. But with his vicious fireball deflected by the backroom staff, he was left dangerously exposed over the weekend. Mandelson, I choose you!

The business secretary and veteran political warhorse described Osborne thus: ”Like a boy in a man’s job”. Saucer of milk, etc etc, but while we wait for the homophobic reaction that dogs Mandy’s every move (let alone when he’s talking about boys and men) David Miliband has also slagged Osborne, describing him as “not a serious person”. He described the Tories’ tactics as “juvenile and student politics…the politics of the big lie and the big smear”. Treasury Chief Secretary Liam Byrne added: “this truth problem for Mr Osborne is becoming a pattern of behaviour”. Vince Cable meanwhile has managed to get mileage out of both his opponents in a single sentence, saying: “The public doesn’t need George Osborne’s imaginary secret documents or conspiracy theories to work out that the public finances are in a bad shape”. 

The Tories were also hurt by the Lib Dems rooting through their post-election plans and finding over £50bn of spending pledges that don’t really chime with Osborne’s prudence – new-school policies like high-speed rail sit next to classic Tory stances like cutting inheritance tax.

While it’s all good fun to see the internecine bitchery of The Hills get transplanted onto the UK’s political scene, this all seems like a case of electioneering distorting the genuinely necessary action. Cuts will be an inevitable part of the next government, whoever it is – the public discomfort at a rocketing deficit can’t be ignored. But the need to score points off and differentiate themselves from Labour has drawn the Conservatives, and to an even greater extent the Lib Dems, towards a economic model based on arch prudence. This is framed for maximum gain as brave and wise, positioned opposite Labour’s supposed recklessness with the public balance sheet.

But it’s too soon to make cuts, and using them as such a hot political topic is dangerous; fiscal stimulus needs to carry on for some time yet. Keynesian economists like Robert Skidelsky and William Keegan have written over the weekend about the importance of letting fiscal stimulus continue, Skidelsky with a simplicity that is either charmingly optimistic or dangerously reductive depending on your leanings: “Had the Government given everyone a spending voucher of £500 last Christmas, the chances are we would have had no output gap and full employment today!”

But for all the weirdly mechanistic and presumptive nature of Keynes, his ideas are still valid, and to ignore them for brief political gain would be disastrous. The recent crowing about the end of the recession, along with the City-minded political economists, means that talk of cuts might not seem too premature, but if the stimulus is cut back before much of the country has had time to feel it, then any future government could find itself with a hole where its income tax should be. Once the economy is genuinely growing again, with consumer spending steady, then we can start worrying about the deficit. At the moment, all the talk of cuts is only benefitting political strategists.

Of course, the issue is the giant hypocrisy that has developed nations, who produce the vast majority of the world’s carbon emissions, telling developing nations that they’re not allowed to produce carbon on anything like the same scale as they are. The developing countries obviously say that they have every right to expand their industry and wealth – India prickled during the summer when put under pressure by the US to cut emissions, saying that they absolutely wouldn’t reduce emissions; they indignantly published figures that showed that in over twenty years from now, their carbon output per capita would still be a quarter of what the US’s output is.

Since then they’ve been somewhat placated by David Miliband, who said last week that he knew India “took climate change seriously”. “I think they are beginning to understand the ground realities in India. You have to talk to each other not at each other”, one Indian campaigner told the Guardian.

Africa, equally, is being fairly aggressive over the potential treatment by the west at the conference, though coming from a completely different angle. While India and China are ramping up their industry, Africa is just trying to pull in a harvest, and climate change stands to affect them the most – “rain does not come at the same time during the start of the planting season or it comes in torrential downpours, or not at all”, as one African agricultural policymaker wrote this week. India and China are trying to preserve their right to emissions; Africa is demanding that developed nations reduce their emissions by 80-95% below 1990 levels by 2050. 

Ethiopian PM Meles Zenawi came out fighting last week, saying: “Africa will not be there to express its participation by merely warming the chairs or to make perfunctory speeches and statements… If need be we are prepared to walk out of any negotiations that threaten to be another rape of our continent”. He also said that Africa wouldn’t be palmed off with pots of money to help them cope with the effects of global warming: “We will never accept any global deal that does not limit global warming to the minimum unavoidable level, no matter what levels of compensation and assistance are promised to us”.

To satisfy all parties is therefore going to require more than just a free messenger bag and 20 complimentary minutes at the hotel spa, and the west knows it. The World Bank is already making soothing noises about the package of compensation and technology India can expect to receive to help them lower their carbon emissions and provide incentives to their people to reduce them further. Furthermore, Michael Spence, the chair of its Commission on Growth and Development, said that a heavy-handed approach towards developing nations could cause “ugly” and “terrifying” consequences: “Trying to get commitments to long-term target emissions from developed and developing countries is unwise and unlikely to result in an agreement”, he said yesterday. He advocates instead letting the developing countries expand their carbon-emitting industries towards the levels of their western chums, before getting everyone to gently reduce their emissions together through new technologies and carbon trading.

Basically, Copenhagen is going to be a diplomatic nightmare. Start bulk ordering the placatory Ferrero Rocher now.

Some of the ways to cut carbon are rather prosaic, like wind farms, but there are some, the geoengineering methods, that seem like things Heath Robinson filed away as “too wacky”. These include “iron fertilization”, where iron is fed into the sea to encourage phytoplankton to grow there and suck up CO2; putting giant mirrors into space to reflect sunlight; making clouds shiny and reflective; “chemical buffering of the oceans”, where you pop alkalis into seawater to encourage CO2 uptake; artificially pumping water around the oceans through giant pipes; putting aluminium particles in space to reflect the sun; reflective balloons; and painting your roof white. Now the Royal Society has, in a paper published yesterday, announced that while all these ideas are silly and expensive, we might nevertheless have to start thinking about them as part of our fight against climate change. 

Let’s be clear, these technologies are being treated by scientists with the same level of reluctance as is usually afforded maverick cops by their superiors in Hollywood films – indignation at their bravado, inefficience and general disrespect for procedure, but with an undertone of grudging admittance that they get the job done. “Some schemes are manifestly far-fetched… some are being promoted over-optimistically”, says Lord Rees in his introduction, adding, “it is already clear than none offers a ‘silver bullet’, and that some options are far more problematic than others.” And yet, and yet! “Geoengineering methods could however potentially be useful in future to augment continuing efforts to mitigate climate change by reducing emissions, and so should be subject to more detailed research and analysis”. Fire up the space mirrors, boys!

The Royal Society says the best ideas are ones that reduce CO2 levels in the long term, rather than ones that reduce global temperatures in the short term, i.e. cloud whitening et al. So the best ideas are planting new forests, but while remembering not to impact upon food production; and physical absorption of CO2 using various chemical processes about which the layperson’s very brain will frown trying to understand (“a humidity swing absorption cycle using surfaces derived from commercial ion-exchange resins” and so on). In essence, carbon capture technologies that use either trees or chemicals to suck up already existing CO2.

Those that get the thumbs down are the encouraging of phytoplankton (pictured right off the coast of Ireland) and any “large-scale manipulation of ecosystems” whose effects are unpredictable and could do more harm than good, which also includes messing with the pH of the sea; and the space mirrors, which, while potentially “cost-effective” when looking at the extremely long term, simply won’t be ready for deployment for many years thanks to the technology not being ready.

As well as the worry that we might skew various ecosystems with our meddling, the whole thing is fraught with the maybe slightly paranoid danger that some Dr. Evil-type character might use geo-engineering to control the climate AND THEREFORE THE WORLD: ”the risk exists that some methods could be deployed by individual nation states, corporations or even one or more wealthy individuals without appropriate regulation or international agreement.” 

They also acknowledge that the whole thing is an ethical minefield, and that even its staunchest proponents regard geoengineering as something of a last resort. Nevertheless, it seems contradictory for the government to support carbon capture in the context of capturing that which is generated through the burning of fossil fuels, and not to support carbon capture of previously existing CO2 through geoengineering. Obviously the most important task is reducing the amount of CO2 being created, but dealing with the rate of its disappearance should be of near-equal importance.