Well, yet another G[n] summit has come and gone, leaving nothing of any consequence. The Climate Change Summit was, as the headline writers had spotted a long time ago, likely to produce nothing more than a lot of hot air.
Many years ago Bjorn Lomborg predicted that governments, having made impressive sounding promises for delivery long into the future, would quietly forget about them as the time for delivery approached and the true cost of these promises became apparent. The Chinese know what cutting carbon is going to cost their country in terms of lost growth, and they are not prepared to pay that price. They are hard-headed pragmatists and know that running their economies on 'free' renewable power sources is actually going to be cripplingly expensive, whatever Greenpeace claims.
We are told that (i) we have hit 'peak oil' and will run out of fossil fuels any day now, and (ii) we are pumping ever-increasing quantities of carbon into the atmosphere with dire consequences for the climate. Why is it that no politician seems to be able to understand that both of these assertions cannot be true at the same time. It seems to me that increasing oil prices are just the kind of signal that is needed to make us reduce our production of CO2 naturally.
Environmental fashions come and go. Perennially we are running out of oil, poisoning the trees in Scandinavia with acid rain, killing ourselves with mercury or lead, destroying the ozone layer with CFCs, turning all male animals into females with oestrogen-mimicking plasticizers, creating dustbowls through monoculture, killing birds of prey with DDT... the list is endless. Perhaps, actually, we don't need to panic quite so much.
If you haven't heard of the real Copenhagen Consensus you should check out
this link.
