Date published: 2009/06/26
The BBC says:
The prime minister is to pledge UK leadership in the international battle against climate change.
He is due to launch a document showing what the UK will offer to the Copenhagen conference tasked with forging a new global climate agreement.
Climate Secretary Ed Miliband described the conference as "make or break time for the climate".
The Road to Copenhagen document will outline plans for ongoing emissions cuts in the UK.
It will also contain practical advice to people on how they can cut emissions and often save money too.
...
The climate department DECC says, for instance, that although China's total emissions are immense, the average European is responsible for emitting twice as much greenhouse gases as the average person in Chinese.But the official tally of emissions does not include aviation and shipping, and it takes no account of emissions embedded in imported goods.
When these are taken into account, the institute calculates that the average UK resident pollutes 15 tonnes a year - almost five times more than the average Chinese person at 3.1 tonnes a year.
This implies that the UK should be making much deeper cuts in emissions than are already planned.
It is good that people are finally worrying about "emissions embedded in imported goods", because it makes a complete mockery of the EU (and Kyoto treaty) emission targets, which completely ignore this inconvient fact. On the other hand, the purpose of the UK government should not be to ensure that UK citizens become as poor as Chinese ones, which is what Miliband is proposing.
In a related story, the BBC says:
Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants to set up a £60bn annual fund to help poor countries deal with climate change.
Well, Brown doesn't say how much he expects the UK to fork over, but given the size of the UK economy relative to the other "rich" countries, perhaps 6 billion per year. This is equivalent to a couple of pence on income tax. The politicians (and the media) should be honest with the British public and say this loud and clear. No doubt instead they will pretend it is all cost free to the British public, because they know full well the British public would oppose it if they knew the real amount. And inevitably, this kind of slush fund would mostly end up in the hands of bankers and lawyers (to broker the deals) and corrupt politicians. And it's not exactly the case that the British government can afford to throw around yet more billions of pounds that it doesn't have.
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