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The boiling point is coming for the fight against climate change
Madeleine Bunting, Guardian
Environmentalists must use their anger at the government’s betrayal on global warming to mobilise the mainstream
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A debate is being conducted across at least four government departments that will have momentous consequences. What is being thrashed out is the level of the proposed cap on the UK’s carbon emissions as part of the European Union’s carbon emissions trading scheme – the central plank of the EU’s commitment to Kyoto. It’s the crunch moment for this government’s commitment to doing anything effective on climate change. Forget all the nice speeches. This technical decision is the key signal of whether it’s “business as usual” or if Tony Blair is finally ready to start handing out the kind of medicine needed if Kyoto is to mean anything.
…It is on climate change that Labour has chalked up its worst record since it came to power. Tony Blair may have been good on the rhetoric in the run-up to the G8 last year (though his wobbles on Kyoto did huge damage) but the domestic front has been an abysmal failure of broken promises and backtracking. “Betrayal” doesn’t quite convey the intensity of the environmental movement’s shock at how, despite all the evidence of the urgency of tackling climate change piled up by scientists over 2005, the government has succeeded in doing very little other than reigniting an old (and many can reasonably argue, irrelevant) debate about the nuclear option.
But the anger and frustration is only intensified by the fact that, frankly, outside a few well-informed environmental activists, nobody is much bothered. The environment was virtually invisible in the 2005 election.
…Many accept that the movement is moving into a new, more difficult phase. The first 30 years were the easy bit, argues Tom Burke, a long-time environmentalist. Campaigns on specific issues such as clean air or water or cuddly animals had clear enemies and, crucially, generated more winners than losers. The second phase is much tougher because on climate change the campaign has to be to change our own behaviour: we are the enemies and we will be the losers. “No to low-cost flights to Ibiza” is never going to be a popular rallying cry.
(16 January 2006)
Long analysis that briefly mentions the end of cheap oil.
No More Mr. Nice Guy
Climate change is pushing this easygoing enviro over the edge
Bill McKibben, Grist
…the environmental movement is reaching an important point of division, between those who truly get global warming, and those who don’t.
By get, I don’t mean understanding the chemistry of carbon dioxide, or the importance of the Kyoto Protocol, or something like that — pretty much everyone who thinks of themselves as an environmentalist has reached that point. By get, I mean understanding that the question is of transcending urgency, that it represents the one overarching global civilizational challenge that humans have ever faced. That it’s as big as the Bomb.
…And in the name of doing something about global warming, I’m willing to be a bit of a jerk.
(12 January 2006)
David Roberts of Gristmill has some criticism.
Earth is too crowded for Utopia
Chris Rapley, BBC (Viewpoint)
The global population is higher than the Earth can sustain, argues the Director of the British Antarctic Survey in the first of a series of environmental opinion pieces on the BBC News website entitled The Green Room. Solving environmental problems such as climate change is going to be impossible without tackling the issue, he says.
…In practice, of course, [population control] is a bombshell of a topic, with profound and emotive issues of ethics, morality, equity and practicability. As found in China, practicability and acceptability can be particularly elusive.
So controversial is the subject that it has become the “Cinderella” of the great sustainability debate – rarely visible in public, or even in private. In interdisciplinary meetings addressing how the planet functions as an integrated whole, demographers and population specialists are usually notable by their absence.
Rare indeed are the opportunities for religious leaders, philosophers, moralists, policymakers, politicians and indeed the “global public” to debate the trajectory of the world’s human population in the context of its stress on the Earth system, and to decide what might be done.
Unless and until this changes, summits such as that in Montreal which address only part of the problem will be limited to at best very modest success, with the welfare and quality of life of future generations the ineluctable casualty.
Professor Chris Rapley is Director of the British Antarctic Survey, based in Cambridge, UK
(6 January 2006)
Critics of TV traveller’s emission-filled globe-trotting say he should quit green transport pressure group
Anthony Barnes, Independent
Frequent flyer Palin: I’ll offer to resign
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Globetrotting broadcaster Michael Palin yesterday said he would stand aside as figurehead of an environmental group if there were genuine concerns that his position was incompatible with his career.
Palin, the president of sustainable travel campaigners Transport 2000, is reported to have caused disquiet within the group that he set a “poor example” by flying around the world for his epic BBC programmes, and has become the subject of a whispering campaign among some members.
But Palin told The Independent on Sunday yesterday: “If Transport 2000 have people that want me to step down that’s fine with me. I have never attempted to pretend that I don’t take long plane journeys and I have written about it in Transport 2000’s newsletter. Yes, I obviously am generating a lot of carbon emissions, but with the programmes I make I am bringing the world closer to a lot of people.
…In the past 18 years – beginning with his real-life effort to follow the journey taken in Jules Verne’s classic Around the World in 80 Days – Palin has made six series using various modes of transport. However, his use of jet aircraft is a common factor in each of the journeys and during his last TV adventure, making the series Himalaya, he is said to have made seven return trips between the UK and Asia.
His trips to far-flung destinations have spurred others on to follow in his footsteps over the years and travel agents talk of the “Palin effect” which occurs when bookings surge after the presenter visits a new location.
But it has been claimed that his high-profile use of long-distance flights goes against the aims of Transport 2000. The body aims to reduce the environmental and social effects of transport by encouraging less reliance on cars, lorries and planes and further use of rail, buses, trams, cycling and walking. There were suggestions last year that Palin would discontinue his round the world travels, but dismissed these by saying: “The truth is that I could no more stop travelling than I could stop drawing breath.”
…In the past two years, Michael Palin has made seven return trips from Britain to the Himalayas, flown to Australia and New Zealand, travelled to San Francisco and New York in the United States and gone to China and Tibet.
…In the past 17 years, Palin has made six television travel series, including Pole to Pole, Full Circle, Sahara and Himalaya. The former Python’s travels have seen him fly more than 250,000 miles.
It is estimated that Palin’s journeys have, between them, created more than 44 tons of carbon dioxide.
(15 January 2006)
It’s a bitter truth that air travel is about the worst thing you can do, in terms of fuel usage and generating greenhouse gases. Coming to terms with this fact is hard for many environmentalists. -BA
Canadians create a huge footprint
Matthew Burrows, Georgia Straight
William Rees [of the University of British Columbia] developed the concept of an ecological footprint, which reveals the impact of humans on the earth.
How seriously are political candidates and major federal parties looking at Canada’s ecological footprint?
“They’re pretty much ignoring the message,” UBC ecological economist William Rees told the Georgia Straight. “These issues are essentially off the table. I support what the Green party is advocating [reducing subsidies for oil and gas and taxing polluters]. The trouble is, they’re always seen as the party with no chance of winning any seats.”
Along with Mathis Wackernagel, his former PhD student, Rees developed a way to measure people’s natural- resource consumption. The ecological-footprint analysis is something he has taught at UBC for the past 20 years, and in 1996 he and Wackernagel coauthored Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth (New Society Publishers).
…Rees has found that despite our wealth of resources and vast land mass—coupled with a small population—Canada’s ecological footprint in 2001 (the most recent year for which figures are available) was the eighth-largest, in the same range as Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Denmark, Ireland, and France.
(12 January 2006)
