The way forward
Posted by Anna Bull on April 21st, 2007
It’s not a coincidence that one of the Scandinavian countries, Norway, is the first country to declare that it will has set a date for achieving carbon neutrality, 2050. While the semantics of ‘carbon neutral’ reveal that it doesn’t mean that Norway will produce no emissions at all but will manage this target by offsetting (that shady term), it is nonetheless a groundbreaking move.
Countries such as Norway are in the habit of looking for collective solutions to problems that affect them collectively. Some of us in more individualistic nations might balk at the massive changes that are needed in the way our country is run to confront the monster issue that is climate change. If we trusted our governments to deal with problems on a national level, and had past evidence to prove it such as maybe state solutions to the problem of early years childcare, then we might be more prepared to leap into the fray and lobby our government to do more about climate change.
Am I the only one who is pretty freaked out by this issue? Seeing we don’t even have a category on this blog for climate change or even the environment, then maybe I am (After all, we have one for Hilary Clinton and I would argue that she is somewhat less important.) It’s easy to dismiss it as an issue that is too big to even contemplate, somewhere along the spectrum near African poverty, but I see it as the defining issue of this decade. I do think that solutions have to be collective rather than individualistic for something of this magnitude, also as people are likely to avoid the issue if it’s going to make them feel guilty about their behaviour all the time. What we can and should do on an individual level is become knowledgeable about this issue so we can kick up a stink when we see lacklustre policies being put in place. (I’m doing my bit by blogging about it)
Filed under: climatechange, environment on April 21st, 2007
Err, Norway?
We also have abundant evidence to prove that governments can deal with problems on a national level, in the shape of pretty much every national institution or scheme ever created by governments at Westminster. It seems unlikely that a scheme of early years childcare would make a blind bit of difference to trust in the government generally, and non whatsoever to public faith in the government’s ability to handle climate change.
Which is before we get to the meat of the pledge…which is basically absent. I’m going to be Prime Minister in 2050. And a multi-platinum recording artist. And a distinguished historian. Catch my drift? Lobbying the government to make a similarly meaningless statement seems unlikely to have much impact, though the article you cite mentions that Britain has a legally binding commitment, surely a step up from the hot air purveyed by Norway as it continues to export billions of dollars worth of petroleum.
Unfortunately the science has moved on, and the ice sheets are moving off - off Greenland and West Antarctic - at an accelerating pace. Leading scientist at NASA, Jim Hanson, reckons we have to keep the global average temperature to within one degree of that in 2000 to prevent total meltdown of these ice sheets and hence many metres of sea-level rise. So we should be aiming to be carbon neutral within a few years, rather than a few decades. Politics needs to adjust to science, not the other way round (as with IPCC’s report). But how can governments deal with a problem which requires such urgent and drastic action to stop CO2 emissions? Only in facing war do we see governments act as we need them to now. Could saving civilisation be a sufficient motivation?
Absolutley agree with the need for extremely urgent action on human made global warming. George Monbiot’s book ‘Heat’ is a hard hitting well researched analysis of this urgency and what we can do about it in very practical terms. He believes that anything less than a 90% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030 is a waste of time.
For a real understanding of what is driving the frenetic competition and economic growth which is at the root of our problems see:- http://www.prosperityuk.com/prosperity/prosperity.html. There are links to excellent articles on how our economic system creates money and explains why approx 95% of money on the planet is debt based - from which 95% of our problems arise! (And what the solutions are - suggest that anyone thinking of going into banking/finance does not read this - it could be too disturbing!!)
Broken link, but I’m not sure the arguments on the site make much sense.
1. Money must be based on the real wealth of society people, skills and materials not on debt. The supply of money must relate to these physical facts not to the requirements of the banking system.
5. Money, at source, is created out of nothing, so there is no need for it to be scarce.
These principles, to choose just one example, are totally inconsistent. If there is no need for money to be scarce, how can it have any meaningful relationship to the real wealth of society etc? It correctly identifies that credit has underpinned economic growth for several hundred years (pretty much as long as there has been meaningful economic growth), but seems to treat this as a gigantic fraud, invisible to everyone except the chosen few.
The only reference to any economist of repute seems to totally misrepresent him-
“avoiding the scenario in which some nations become ‘creditors’ and others ‘debtors’ through their trade accounts.”
“Nations that imported more than they exported — debtor nations — would pay a small interest charge to the Clearing Union on their overdrawn account.”
Anyone who has even a vague understanding of economics would laugh at this.
And citing Monbiot on climate change is akin to citing Lenin on private enterprise.
“economic growth … is at the root of our problems” - keep making this kind of argument and governments and voters will just keep ignoring you. The difficulty of the climate change issue is to find a way out of the nightmare of global warming without walking into the nightmare of a planned economy.
The government only needs to nudge the market in the right direction. We can already see companies like Marks and Spencer reaping the profits of an environment-centred advertising campaign. We need to supplement this benefit with a gentle tax incentives to make more companies jump on board. We need to make environmental responsibility profitable.
As a chemist, I still remain unconvinced that the sole villain in the piece with regard to global warming is carbon dioxide, let alone human produced carbon dioxide.
Any reading of the literature shows you that there is a much more powerful greenhouse gas out there in much larger quantities than carbon dioxide in water vapour. It also seems to have been missed that in reparing the hole in the ozone layer by swapping various chlorofluorohydrocarbons for butane in our aerosols, we have released a further powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.
Again, in the literature, it would seem that the oceans themselves produce far more carbon dioxide that the whole of Europe put together, and that a more careful look at global warming and CO2 production suggests that in many cases, increases in CO2 in the atmosphere follow increases in global temperatures rather than precede them.
What we are actually measuring when we measure global temperatures is also questionable. The rise in average temperature in New York has been less than a degree over the last 80 years or so. The rise in temperature in Albany, at roughly the same latitude has been almost zero. Would we not expect these measurements to be comparable?
There are those who argue that yes, these questions do exist, however, the precautionary principle tells us that we should accept the global warming arguments, just in case they are true. Talk to the geneticists. There are those who would believe that it was a genetic predisposition towards the precautionary principle and a lack of risk taking by the neanderthals that led to their demise.
I have a feeling that the cat was really let out of the bag by Gordon Brown in his last budget speeech when he said that his increase in taxation on vehicles with large CO2 emissions had allowed him to reduce the tax burden on the lowest paid. I thought the income from these taxes was going to fund our assault on climate change? Far be it from me that politicians like climate change as it gives them the perfect excuse to raise taxes.
“reduce the tax burden on the lowest paid”
“the perfect excuse to raise taxes.”
Surely that would just be redistribution?
“Talk to the geneticists. There are those who would believe that it was a genetic predisposition towards the precautionary principle and a lack of risk taking by the neanderthals that led to their demise.”
And what is this supposed to mean? It seems to me that the possibility of climate change doing damage is much higher than the possibility of another strain of humanoids rising up and overthrowing homo sapiens because we took precautions against climate change. Arguing against taking precautions against anything because the neanderthals died out is an amazingly weak position- you are generalising from a speculative theory about an extinct species. If you gamble, do you play recklessly for high stakes because of “a lack of risk taking by the neanderthals that led to their demise”?