Date published: 2007/03/13
The BBC says:
Britain could become the first country to set legally binding carbon reduction targets under plans unveiled by Environment Secretary David Miliband.
The draft Climate Change Bill calls for an independent panel to set ministers a "carbon budget" every five years, in a bid to cut emissions by 60% by 2050.
If they miss the figure, future governments could be taken to court.
The Tories and Lib Dems welcomed the proposals, but said carbon budgets should be set annually.
Mr Miliband has said annual targets would be too rigid to make allowances for climate variations.
He hailed the draft bill as "the first of its kind in any country", and said Britain was "leading by example".
The draft legislation will go to public and parliamentary consultation before becoming law next year, but environmental campaigners want to raise the 2050 target to 80% and set annual 3% cut targets to ensure compliance.
What a bunch of wimps those so-called environmentalists are. Why 80%? Let's be really virile and go for 90% (well, some of them do indeed advocate this). A few years ago they were saying 60%, but now that that concept is so passé they of course have to up the ante, otherwise they risk looking irrelevant (which they are). (Oh, and "the world has changed", blah, blah.)
And rather than look at it as 60%, 80% and 90% cuts from 1990, the more sensible way to look at it is to say these are 40%, 20% and 10% of the 1990 values. The difference between 60% and 80% seems small, but in fact what this represents, as is clear from the 40% and 20% figures, is a halving of the allowed carbon emissions. And similarly 10% would be another halving. This is non-trivial.
For once the government seems to have more-or-less gotten it right. Of course when the article says that "future governments could be taken to court" it is a bit meaningless. So one arm of the government sues another arm of the government, so what. It's irrelevant unless they are going to stick ministers in prison (and of course ministers in 2050 will claim it is all the fault of ministers in 2025, or whatever).
In 2050 this day will either be remembered as an important milestone, or more likely it will be completely forgotten because it proved to be so irrelevant.
Of course these emission figures use false accounting. The industries that will suffer from these proposals are the fossil-fuel intensive ones. Well, those industries might disappear from Britain, but many are just going to relocate abroad, and Britain will then import those goods, and everybody will pretend that we are not responsible for those emissions but that somebody else is. This is wrong. If Britain can successfully substitute services for goods then the reckoned emissions will fall but the actual emissions Britain is responsible for will increase. If Britain cannot successfully make this transition and if the emission cuts are enforced (somehow) then the British standard of living will have declined.
And interestingly enough, nobody ever says whether these emissions cuts are absolute or per capita. It is presumably the former. But the British population could easily decrease by 10% by 2050, or equally well increase by 10% by 2050. The per capita difference in carbon emissions between those two scenarios is of course around 20%, which is huge. Nobody ever seems to worry about that point, but it makes a big difference for each and every citizen of Britain. Well, it's all off in the distant future, so nobody cares.
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