Independent: Climate change: US economist's grim warning to Blair's Cabinet

[arenean]

From "The Independent":

One witness said: "The entire pitch of the report is that there is nothing in it about the need to be green, or about caring for the environment, it's all hard-headed economic reality," he said.


The Treasury believes that publication of the Stern report could be a turning point in public opinion in America, to force the Bush administration to accept the scientific evidence that global warming is happening.

"It is huge, a desk-breaker. It could be as important for climate change as the Africa Commission was for poverty in Africa. Its biggest impact could be on public opinion in America, which is like turning around a tanker," said one official. It is expected to dominate the UN international climate talks scheduled to start in Nairobi, Kenya, next week.

Full Article

[tom_paine]

1. This article has a deep misunderstanding of what is going on in Amerika

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1932727.ece

Look at the way it is almost pleading for the Stern Report to be the sensible tipping point which changes the Imperial position by destroying it's arguments with hardheaded business logic rather than the "squishy" appeals to the Public Good and the Future (the nonsense of that position is fit for another topic).

But Imperial Amerika is blanketed in propaganda and lies of a new, subtle, and highly virulent variety. Breaking through that is different matter. Further complicated by the fact that it really doesn't matter what the Imperial Subjects of Amerika believe anyway.

The Imperial Family and Party has the power and we will soon see if they are going to relinquish any of it.

If I am overstating tyranny's hold on Amerika and it therefore has always been America, perhaps the Stern Report can do what the Independant fereverently hopes it will do.

But in my mind, such a conversion would be like convincing the Nazis that concentration camps were bad for business and the economy, which they surely were.

Totalitarian power structures simply do not respond to logic and reason, no matter how hard-headed and unsentimental.