Copenhagen Discord (2)

“I don’t think you should be so critical”, the young NGO drone chided me in a public meeting.

And I thought I had the right to express my opinions – I think the Kyoto Protocol was a deeply flawed global compromise with deliberately low ambitions and compromised policy and framework proposals.

Enforce a market in a negative commodity ? How ridiculous !

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Sidetracked

Sidetracked
by Jo Abbess
19 February 2010

A number of prevalent ideological frameworks employed for constructing policy to address Global Warming appear to have faulty foundational analysis and are therefore ineffective in addressing Carbon Dioxide Emissions. Politically implementable options that could lead to effective action to combat Climate Change are being kicked into the long grass at every turn, in policy, in investment and in society.

Reasonable proposals are being made over-complex to implement, or delayed by every means possible. The dominant memes of economics hinder good decision-making; for example, not all natural capital can be valued as a commodity, and yet Carbon markets and Carbon tax regimes are the most ubiquitous proposals.

The cheapest options for efficiency are overlooked for subsidy-attracting large-scale projects; and wholescale sustainability approaches are being discarded in favour of focus on obsessional marginal issues such as recycling.

The imperative to deliberately orient investment towards Low Carbon energy is lost in the haze of planning based on non-solutions such as the renaissance of Nuclear Power and Carbon Capture and Storage in the pursuit of so-called “Clean” Coal.

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Tesco Town : Bloated Parasite

Flickr Image : David Breslin @ b3ta

Not content with having four very similar Planning Applications overturned previously in quiet, suburban Highams Park, London E4, (including one taken to a Public Inquiry), nothing seems to be able to stop Tesco trying again, with a remarkably unchanged plan for a mega-superstore with crowded urban-style blocks of adjacent flats.

Only this time it’s got a “travellator”, you know, the kind of moving walkway normally found at airports, to take you from the ground floor car park atrocity to the first floor store.

This is their attempt to design the plan into our hearts. But not even a brilliant architect can make a catwalk model out of this bloated parasitical plan :-

http://www.highamsgreen.co.uk

The local residents are up in arms, flexing their telephone dialling fingers, and furiously typing letters and electronic mails about this abomination of a Planning Application :-

http://www.highamsparkforum.co.uk/tesco.html

If you yourself live in London E4, you can submit a comment on this plan yourself very easily on the Council’s website, quoting the Application Numbers 2008/1490 and 2008/1491 :-

https://www1.walthamforest.gov.uk/webforms/plan_comments/

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Bjørn Lomborg : Climate Joker

In his own, special, blond, way, I feel Bjørn Lomborg is as dangerous as Martin Durkin. They both act like incarnations of The Climate Joker in my view, showing different capricious sides to the destructive force of mankind’s inhumanity to man (and beast and tree).

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Pouncing on the Pussycat Parade

He may prowl like a cat and purr like a cat, and make out he’s soft and sweet in interviews, but Peter Mandelson’s ideological positioning gives him the impression of him more resembling a pawn, an eel or a rat, and gives me a shudder of disgust; and I’m glad to hear the Climate Rush non-Pussycat Dolls have seen fit to pounce on him :-

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/aug/10/mandelson-climate-protest-vestas

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Joan Ruddock : Flashback 2008

Notes from PA21 Meeting with the Under-Secretary of State for the Environment

Meeting Date : Tuesday 25th March 2008
Meeting Time : 14:05 – 15:00
Meeting Venue: Whitehall

Attendees

Joan Ruddock MP, Under-Secretary of State, Environment
Annette Brooke MP
Tony Hamilton PA21 Chair
Theresa McManus PA21 Secretary
Naomi Matteson

Notes from Meeting

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Is That All There Is ?

Over the course of aeons of archeaological time, there has been a lot of death, I mean mass extinction, periods of natural hyper-slaughter and climate mayhem, atmospheric toxicity and ocean wipeout.

It’s all in the fossil record, except where those dead things have decomposed or chemically transposed into other things, like petroleum oil.
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What We Have Here Is A Failure To Innovate

Remember the American Space Program ?

Very large sums of public tax money have been ploughed into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration over the years, peaking in 1966 :-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget

OK, it gave us the Moon landings and Teflon (TM), but just recently, I don’t see much in terms of really, really new things.

What’s happened to the innovation ?
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No Country for Old Men

Heaven knows what Aubrey Meyer must feel like some days.

For every ounce of frustration I feel about the sloth-like pace of the international Climate negotiations, he must feel a pound of nerve-wrecking agitational sweating stress.

The United States of America has been trumpeting its progressive politics again this week, asserting itself as the world’s Climate Change leader at the G8 talks in L’Aquila in Italy.
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Big Carbon Cuts Coming

Some simple analysis of the Carbon Dioxide emissions in the UK leads to several pertinent conclusions :-

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Astonishing Admissions

At the Climate Change campaign meeting on Saturday, “Six Months to Copenhagen”, hosted by the Fabian Society in London, Ed Miliband said some things I find astonishing admissions.

The Climate Change Committee, after having looked into the matter of Carbon Budgets on Carbon Emissions Reductions for the United Kingdom, made recommendations for our national targets :-

http://hmccc.s3.amazonaws.com/pdfs/LaunchPressRelease01.12.08.pdf
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Mr Tesco Speaks Of Zero

Terry Leahy, the CEO of Tesco, the largest supermarket chain in Britain, spoke at the 5th June 2009 conference “The politics of climate change : from economic crisis to business revolution”. His mood was ebullient, it seemed to me.

“We’re going to miss all the targets we set ourselves.” I think he might have been referring to both the Kyoto Protocol and the UK / EU 2020 targets, so I don’t know why he seemed so buoyant about it.
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