Drowning By Numbers - G8 Climate Action Likely Exercise In Futility

[hatrack]

EDIT

"Serious work - following the hiatus caused by the election - is now under way to prepare for the Gleneagles summit in two months' time, but in contrast to the government's bold proposals for Africa its wish list on climate change is timid. There is a reason for this: the prime minister knows he has a big problem on his hands with George Bush but would still like to bind the Americans into a G8 deal. Rather than go hard on the issue, he has soft pedalled by suggesting that the way ahead is to rely primarily on technology to solve the problem, in the hope that that will assuage US fears that any global deal poses a risk to American living standards.

Judging by the comments made by Harlan Watson, America's chief climate change negotiator, the softly softly approach has so far been an abject failure. Watson told the BBC that the US would do nothing that harmed its economy and would not join an initiative unless it was truly global, involving developing as well as developed countries.

In one sense the American approach seems utterly insane. After all, if the bulk of the scientific evidence is correct then the US economy is going to be devastated by global warming at some point, perhaps in the not-too-distant future. Of course, it may be that the climate change sceptics are right and that the retreat of the glaciers and the rise in global temperatures and the higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere are merely the regular rhythm of nature, signifying not very much at all, and certainly not enough to suggest that drastic measures should be taken that might affect economic growth. Rather than apply the precautionary principle - take action, just in case - the answer is to to encourage capitalism to find its own solution to the problem (assuming that there is one). Interestingly, however, the US was quite happy to apply the precautionary principle to Iraq, even though the hard evidence of a global threat proved to be negligible.

As Andrew Simms says in his excellent new book, there is something illogical about a state of affairs in which we encourage growth in order to pay for the damage caused by growth. "Applied to a person, the logic runs that an indi-Gleneagles statement supporting the principle would put the Chinese on the spot The US would be a world leader in clean technology enjoying high profit margins Larry Elliott vidual must work until they make themselves sick, in order to buy the medicines needed to return to work." A second problem is what Simms calls the Humpty Dumpty factor. If we smash up the global environment, can we be sure that we can put it back together again? The answer, of course, is that we can't and that if we wait until even the oil companies and the car manufacturers admit that global warming is something that needs tackling, it could well be too late."

EDIT

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1484873,00.html

[orwell]

1. Thanks...

for the article hat.

Just another in a long series of logical fallacies embraced by BushCorp and his enablers.

I could never understand why conservation is not viewed as a "conservative" approach. It only makes sense when you see conservation as a threat to the next quarter's profit of some very powerful industries.

It is even more alarming when you realize that conservation should be a prime component for long term profit growth and sustainability.

[phantom power]

2. I wonder what "technology" they think they can rely on?

The subtext of this seems to be that everybody wants to wait for some solution to present itself that's cheap and painless. Which is a shame, since every year we wait makes any real solution more expensive and painful.