Categories
Burning Money Climate Change

Make Copenhagen Treaty “Meaty”

Phone your leader :

Sign the Greenpeace Petition :

Sign the Avaaz Petition :

There’s one thing we know : the Earth does not compromise. Politicians might think that they can compromise with the Science; and worse still, the Climate Change Deniers might think that they can compromise the public mind, but in the end the Data will have the final say.

One day, the fringe, radical opinion will be called upon by those at the centre of the debate. Not a debate about whether the climate is changing or not, but the negotiations about who will do what.

Some currently argue that the West was won (and the North) by the immoral earnings from the deep South (and the far East) : the industrialised countries have accrued their wealth on the basis of historical and continuing exploitation of the systems of trade and finance, to garner to their store all the material resource riches of the whole world.

This historical inequality, this chute of nature, taking food, minerals, fuels sliding Northwards and Westwards : for this the rich should pay : Carbon rights should not be “grandfathered” : the rich should not assume they have the free right to continue polluting as they have in the past. The rich should pay up on their historical debt.

Categories
Climate Change Cost Effective

Gordon Brown’s Goodie Bag

Gordon Brown has announced possibly the single most important proposal on Climate Change Adaptation to date.

He went to London Zoo towards the end of June to announce a bold proposal for global funding. [ Why the Zoo ? Something to do with political overtones or biodiversity ? ]

What was heralded with praise and aplomb on that day has now been unpacked as containing some “fake” accounting, in terms of the British publicly funded contribution : funds being merely swapped from budget line to budget line.

Plus, part of the proposed funding is expected from the global Carbon Trade markets, and as we’ve seen so far from the European Trading Scheme, it is by no means certain that this will work as expected.

It might turn out to be not quite the goodie bag that Gordon Brown made out. If so, that’s a real shame, because this was meritable move.