Climate Change
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.
At the conference “The politics of climate change : from economic crisis to business revolution” on 5th June 2009, Stelios Haji-Ioannou ended up flying by the seat of his pants.
“I’m usually [cast as] the Devil. People are trying to find a high-profile industry [to target]…[they choose] airlines.”
Anthony Giddens spoke at the conference called “The politics of climate change : from economic crisis to business revolution” on Friday 5th June 2009.
For someone who is normally so high-falutin’ in his academic contortions, he was remarkably pragmatic.
Adair Turner must be a bundle of nerves, sitting, as he does on both the Financial Services Authority and the Climate Change Committee.
He’s often asked to speak on behalf of ideas that are shaky, like cracking down on the banks with stronger regulation, whilst avoiding blaming the banks themselves for the financial crisis :-
Everyone who is grappling with the Twin Terrors of Climate Change and Peak Oil, sooner or later comes across a graph like this one (which I hand-drew for a Transition Towns meeting this evening) :-
Last week’s conference “The politics of climate change : from economic crisis to business revolution” was a great opportunity to bump into people I only normally read about.
Trouble is, although they irritate me at a distance by what they have said, or spent, or decided, or spun, when I meet them my anger has subsided and I just can’t get the venom together to be rude.
Britain is not Fair. The division between rich and poor is getting wider, and the number of those at the bottom of the stack is rising. This is going to have a significant impact on the ability of people in Great Britain to adapt to Climate Change policy.
Social measures must surely include public investment in de-Carbonising each home. At costs 100 times less than the announced new Nuclear Power programme, and an order of magnitude cheaper than the Carbon Capture and Storage demonstration projects, I think this shows excellent value for money as well as ethical rectitude.
It has become fashionable, since the Financial Crisis was admitted to publicly, for high net worth individiuals to propagate Public Relations campaigns in support of their industry of choice. Normally the industry that makes all their money for them.
In the United States they call this process a “bailout”, making it sound like a worthy rescue of a valued affiliate. In the United Kingdom, it’s called “public support”. It all amounts to the same thing : tax revenue from the public thrown at the private corporations.
At the “The politics of climate change : from economic crisis to business revolution” conference on 5th June 2009, Peter Mandelson’s face was all puffed and pale. He looked rather like a middle-aged drag queen who’s had an allergic reaction to her démaquillant. Or it could be all those late night supposed emergency mini-conferences with Gordon Brown. Or Alan Sugar. You never know.
Tony Blair looked greyer than ever as he lightfooted it into the auditorium. “He still hasn’t had the surgery to pin back his ears”, I noted to the chap I had been talking to on my right, “I don’t meant to be rude, but he’s still got that sticky-outy look. I would have thought that would be the first thing he’d do with all the money.”
If you or anyone you know is young and unencumbered (you know, without kids or other dependents, like an employer for example) and living in London E17 (England), please, we need you to help us roll out the Transition Waltham Forest project :-
[ Comments on “A Blueprint for a Safer Planet” by Nicholas Stern ]
So, I might be promoting sales of Nicholas Stern’s book with this post, but actually I think we should all read this book, just to be conscious of how Neoliberal Economics hasn’t evolved to encompass reality, even if it thinks it has.
There are many statements, assertions and hopes about the progress and possibilities of technology in Nicholas Stern’s book “A Blueprint for a Safer Planet : How to Manage Climate Change and Create a New Era of Progress and Prosperity”.
[ UPDATE – part of my argument about Coal got garbled. I have bolded changes.]
Over the Late Spring Bank Holiday Weekend, I had the unintentional opportunity to spend some recreational time with someone employed by the Government of the United Kingdom. I am not going to divulge details.
This person had clearly been to Brainwashing School and was on-message consistently, even in the relaxed and non-formal setting. They repeated, almost verbatim, rationales I have been hearing for several years.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology have issued some seriously educational material about the risks of Global Warming, by contrasting the range of outcomes with and without Policy :-
It sometimes seems that truth is not only stranger than fiction, it’s out there, somewhere, way beyond our active recall.
We all know from our early years education that Petroleum Oil is a finite resource, unless we were home-schooled by Creationists.
From now on, all road trips will get leaner, cleaner and greener.
That’s the astonishing and very welcome news from Team Obama in the United States :-
https://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/19/obama-carbon-emissions-auto-industry
UPDATE : I have been advised to be more precise about what Beulah actually is. The update is bolded for your convenience.
The Weyburn Oil Field field in Saskatchewan, Canada has been the centre of attention for several good reasons over the last few years.
Some of the grease-brained petroleum engineers had a brilliant idea one day : how about trying to pump extra oil out of the field by injecting waste gas into it ?
The British political system is currently reeling from a scandal so far-reaching and so widely-spread that it seems hard to know what shape it will take in the future.
Government Ministers and their opposite numbers in the other Parties are being thrown from their ranks, and even their “safe seats”, back home in their Constituencies.
Everywhere I’ve gone for the last couple of weeks, I’ve taken Nick Stern with me. Or rather, his bright blue book with the “World Class” title “A Blueprint for a Safer Planet”.
Two members of the unelected camera of the United Kingdom have recently accused Greenpeace of being hijacked by political views on globalisation (“Green movement ‘hijacked’ by politics”, The Guardian, 13th May 2009) :-
https://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/may/13/green-movement-hijacked-politics
I remember the second time I saw this graph. It was shown to me by that enthusiastic young guy Guy Shrubsole, who waved a printed copy under my nose and asked me if I’d seen it and knew what it meant. I had and I did :-
https://climatechange.cbi.org.uk/uploaded/climatereport2007mckinseyapp.pdf
To answer Climate Change we must have strategies for new Low Carbon Energy investment.
The technologies we need to deploy are those that are already proven, and can be installed in the fastest possible time. What we can DO, and DO NOW.
This is DO-Tech, NOW-Tech : and it effectively rules out new rounds of Nuclear Energy, which is slow-to-grid. It also rules out the almost entirely hypothetical Carbon Capture and Storage.
I’m starting to read Nicholas Stern’s new book “A Blueprint for a Safer Planet : How to Manage Climate Change and Create a New Era of Progress and Prosperity.” No hint of megalomania, grandstanding or grandiosity, there, then.
Here’s a simple thought experiment.
If you can see a flaw in it, you’re welcome to contradict me.
Although December 2009 is more than six months away, in reality the World has seven weeks of further negotiations before the main details of a Global Climate Treaty must be agreed for delivery at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (COP) in December 2009 in Copenhagen Denmark.