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Global growth in carbon emissions is ‘out of control’
Steve Connor, Independent
The growth in global emissions of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels over the past five years was four times greater than for the preceding 10 years, according to a study that exposes critical flaws in the attempts to avert damaging climate change.
Data on carbon dioxide emissions shows that the global growth rate was 3.2 per cent in the five years to 2005 compared with 0.8 per cent from 1990 to 1999, despite efforts to reduce carbon pollution through the Kyoto agreement.
Much of the increase is probably due to the expansion of the Chinese economy, which has relied heavily on burning coal and other fossil fuels for its energy.
Dr Mike Raupach, chair of the Global Carbon Project, an international collaboration of researchers who compiled the latest figures, warned yesterday that emissions were spiralling out of control.
(11 Nov 2006)
News analysis: Climate Change
Geoffrey Lean, The Independent
In the future we may each have our own personal emissions allowance. When that happens, we will truly have entered the carbon age. Until then, this is how a world of national CO2 targets looks
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We are now standing on the threshold of the carbon age. Throughout the rest of our lifetimes, and far into the future as global warming takes hold, we will progressively measure our actions in the stuff.
Already the rules for the new age are beginning to emerge. We are beginning to learn that we should reduce our “carbon footprint” – the amount of greenhouse gases we each produce – to tread more lightly on the Earth. Companies are taking up “carbon trading”. Ministers are even starting to consider carbon rationing (except that they dare not use the words), where each of us will be entitled to cause only a limited, and diminishing, amount of pollution. It has all come a long way since the element was known mainly as the “lead” in a pencil.
Carbon – which combines so readily with other elements that it is known to form nearly 10 million different compounds – is the most important building block of life. We exhale it with every breath, eat it in every meal. And, since the Industrial Revolution, we have used it, laid down over eons in underground “fossil fuels” – coal, oil and gas – to power our ever more prosperous and mobile lives.
(12 Nov 2006)
Background article.
Country needs to be on war footing against global warming: Labour leader
Agence France Presse (AFP) via Yahoo!News
The government needs to rally its people to fight a “war” against global warming much the way it mobilized for World War II, a leading member of the Labour Party has said.
Michael Meacher, a former environment minister who last week launched a campaign to move the Labour Party in a new direction, told GMTV television Sunday that action on climate change could provide the “new vision” the party needed.
“This is the one overriding overall political issue which challenges the future of the human species on this planet,” said Meacher, who has refused to rule out a challenge for the Labour leadership.
“We are very good in this country at getting behind a collective cause which we all know has to be absolutely hugely overridingly important, as we did in 1939,” Meacher said.
(12 Nov 2006)
Shameful editorial from Le Monde:
“Only communists care for the environment”
Jerome a Paris, Daily Kos
Le Monde is, like the NYT in the USA, the establishment, left-of-center paper of record in France. It tends to be supportive of the social-democrats (i.e the centrist wing of the Socialist party), socially liberal, and, like the NYT, increasingly to the right on economic issues – mostly in an apparently semi-unconscious parroting of the common wisdom of the day. This means giving credence to the worst talking points of the “drown the government in the bathtub” right.
Today, à la Crichton or à la Lomborg, Eric Le Boucher, the economics editorial writer of the paper is accusing environmentalists of being wrong to call for action on Global Climate Change – for all the usual stupid reasons…
…The immediate cause of Mr Le Boucher’s outrage is the mediatic impact of Nicolas Hulot, a former presenter of a TV show on nature, who is arguing for a programme (Le Monde summary, behind sub. wall, translated below) to cut carbon emissions and has been courted in recent days by politicians on both the left and the right.
…the right thing is to work immediately on energy sustainability, irrespective of what others do, and agitate for global action on climate change and carbon emissions. but that includes agitating locally so that each of our countries get ready to act, and create a critical mass that can convince others to join in. Despite its flaws, Kyoto has created that critical mass, and has allowed the creation of mechanisms (like the carbon trading schemes) that can be used in the future as more countries join and an agreement can be found on how to share the effort fairly.
And in that context, the demonization of environmentalists as closet communists, and the parallel demonization of all those that argue for government intervention, taxes and regulation to deal with society-wide problems is insane and needs to be fought with the upmost energy. Economic freedom has to stop when it steps directly on the well being of society, and the mindless, unquestioning, defense of corporations and of deregulation that we see in too much mainstream media coverage must be noted, criticized and argued against.
(11 Nov 2006)
The good news, as Jerome points out in his post, is the growing momentum in France for action on climate change. -BA
