John Rentoul: Against all odds, a step up for the planet
The global commitment to tackle climate change will make a difference. It would not have happened without a clutch of Blairites
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Independent Minds
One of my hobbies is collecting. And one of the things I collect is Questions to Which the Answer is No. Preferably questions laden with significance in Daily Mail headlines, which carry the implication that the answer is affirmative but for which the newspaper knows it has no evidence. A recent one was: "Could Lord Mandelson become Prime Minister?" One of my favourites was "Is this Atlantis?" in The Sun, reproducing a Google Earth picture of the seabed near the Azores. A Google spokesman was quoted a few days later, explaining that the apparent grid of straight lines reflected the path of boats as they gathered data from the sea floor.
Last week's addition to my collection was the heading on a full page of analysis in The Independent: "Will it really be possible to meet the G8's climate change targets?" To which the honest answer is: "Of course not." And yet I must say, as someone who would like the answer to be "Yes", that last week's summit in Italy was a triumph.
How so? Because climate change is such a big problem, requiring an act of collective will by billions of people, most of whom have more immediate worries. There is no hope of a complete or perfect solution to it. Indeed, climate change is already happening and a lot of future global warming has already been locked into the system, given that the burning of carbon fuels is not going to stop this year or next. The only thing that can happen, therefore, is a chaotic interplay of attempts to reduce – too late – carbon use and to adapt – too late – to a warmer climate, and this at a point when other human pressures on the planet's resources are becoming chronic.
It was, therefore, a great achievement to secure a preliminary agreement among the richest countries to make deep cuts by the middle of this century. The target of an 80 per cent cut won't be met, and, even if it were, the average global temperature is likely to rise by more than the C target also agreed as the upper limit of tolerable change. But some kind of reduction is likely, and it will be greater and earlier than it would have been if last week's deal had fallen through.
However insufficient any reduction is, it will still make it easier for future generations to cope with the environmental crisis we have bequeathed them. That is why it is worthwhile, but it is a triumph because, until recently in the long history of world summitry, it seemed so unlikely. It now seems probable that a meaningful global carbon-reduction deal will be reached at the mother of all green summits in Copenhagen in December.
That is why optimism is such a precious commodity, even, or perhaps especially, when it seems slightly ridiculous. Because it is a ludicrous notion: that all humanity could unite in a common enterprise of this magnitude. The serious objection to trying to achieve it comes not from those who deny the science of climate change – whose cultish tendency is likely to intensify as the evidence accumulates – but from those who say it can't be done without a world government, or at all.
So how did it happen? The big change is President Obama. Obviously. He can do no wrong. He still enjoys a 58 per cent favourable rating in US Gallup polls, and is even more popular in the rest of the world. But it was a small triumph also for Gordon Brown. And, unlikely as it may seem, for three other British leaders. It may seem strange to give any credit to a prime minister so reviled at home, especially one who appears to show so little interest in green issues. And it may seem parochial to wonder about the contribution of British politicians at all to such an endeavour, representing as they do a country that is responsible for such a small share of global emissions.
But it is not ridiculous to say that David Miliband, his brother Ed and, above all, Tony Blair have contributed as much as anyone to last week's milestone. Climate change was barely on the agenda for international summits until Blair put it there at the Gleneagles G8 in 2005. Since then, Britain's record as an exemplar has been mixed. But the Miliband brothers have achieved much. First David at Environment and now Ed at the new department of Energy and Climate Change – created by Brown last year although, as David said last week, Blair should have created it in 1997. As one observer put it, referring to their father, Ralph Miliband, the Marxist historian: "They are the sons of the Enlightenment. For them, a Problem with a capital P requires the application of Reason with a capital R to produce a Solution with a capital S. The trouble is that this doesn't take into account chaos and evil."
But they have passed a Climate Change Act, with Conservative support, that commits Britain to the most ambitious short-term target of any country in the world, of a 34 per cent cut in emissions by 2020, only 11 years away. Ed Miliband has produced a policy for clean coal power that is an example to the world, and a plan for the biggest wind farm in the world, the London Array in the Thames Estuary, to start operating in 2012.
Britain's record is not perfect, and chaos and evil will intervene. But if rich countries need to lead by example, we can be proud enough. Was it worth it? That is a question to which the answer is Yes.
John Rentoul's blog is at independent.co.uk/jrentoul
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Comments
But how? Wind farms, solar panels, geothermal, tidal ... these are the genuine renewables.
But when it comes to what Media Lens has called the "Techno-Fix" we are on much less secure ground.
John Rentoul seems very taken with "clean coal", yet only recently it was stated that Drax coal-fired power station would have a problem with CCS as it's all of forty miles from the sea!
I wonder how many coal-fired power stations in the US and China are within forty miles of the sea?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2
Other, even more ludicrous schemes are being touted under the techno-fix label, the latest being a scheme to "Just add lime to the sea":
" ... the world would need to mine and process about 10 cubic kilometres of limestone each year to soak up all the emissions the world produces, and the plan would only make sense if the CO2 resulting from lime production could be captured and buried at source ..."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2
So we now need CCS AND huge quantities of lime to fix the climate!
However, the search for the techno-fix is driven by the desire to reduce CO2s without threatening the current addiction to economic growth.
Enter the other elephant: resource depletion.
One day we will have to face up to the fact that the earth's resources are finite and our economic activity will have to be constrained by that fact.
Cutting CO2s will not be enough.
If you knew anything about science, you would KNOW that there is nothing wrong with the climate.
You'd see through scientists' scams to raise grant income.
And you'd see through traders seeing 'cap 'n' trade' as a new casino.
There are many problems to do with the earth to be changed.
Temperature is not one of them.
And the sooner you and your politico friends faced reality and did what is crying out to be done, the better.........
"Indeed, climate change is already happening and a lot of future global warming has already been locked into the system, " How? This is absolute scientific claptrap. The IPCC models are based on the hypothesis that CO2 absorption and re-radiation will cause atmospheric heating due to positive feedback of water vapour. The atmosphere is well mixed so heating will automatically follow the increase in CO2. Talking of global warming being magically locked into the system is ridiculous. The models predicted a clear correlation between the quantity of CO2 and atmospheric temperature. CO2 has increased year on year yet atmospheric temperatures have remained constant or have fallen during the last decade.
Then Rentoul writes: "However insufficient any reduction is, it will still make it easier for future generations to cope with the environmental crisis we have bequeathed them." More alarmist propaganda, unless it is referring to the possibility of another cooling period which is worrying bearing in mind the industrialised countries declining power supplies.
Then we have the Obama worship and the suggestion that Brown is a greenie at heart. Why is Rentoul surprised that Obama has signed up to this so called breakthrough? After all, Obama is a born again warmist and he said he would bankrupt the US coal industry if it tried to build more power stations. And as to Brown being a converted greenie, balls. He wall say anything to curry favour from Obama.
Any person with half a mind knows that this 50 percent or 80 percent reduction of CO2 by the industrial West is useless because China will not reduce her emissions and is commissioning a coal fired power station every ten days. Even if Europe reduces CO2 emissions to zero the atmospheric level of the harmless trace gas will still increase. When will politicians and alarmist journalists stop trying to pull the wool over our collective eyes.
By all means reduce our reliance on coal and oil because they are finite resources but don't tie it to this AGW hoax. Work hard to make Europe including the UK a nuclear power region. It is clean and reliable.
There seems to be a desperate attempt to keep this myth going to fuel the need for extra taxes and because so many people now have a vested interest as they are making a lot of money out of silly schemes and carbon trading.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/g