Global warming: Your chance to change the climate
The cover story of today’s UK Independent: Global warming: Your chance to change the climate
Four senior ministers today made one of the most embarrassing admissions of the Labour Government’s nine years in office - that the official policy for fighting climate change has failed.
Yet, as they did so, a group of MPs will offer a different way forward in the struggle to combat global warming, one which they think is the only alternative. It will mean turning established principles of British economic life upside down. It will mean sacrifices from everyone. Therefore, they say, it will have to be taken out of politics.
In The Independent today, their leader, Colin Challen, the chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group, sets out the case for abandoning the “business as usual” pursuit of economic growth, which has been the basis of Western economic policy for two hundred years. Instead, he says, we must concentrate our efforts on putting a limit on the emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from power stations and motor vehicles that are causing the atmosphere to warm.
This is a very important article. The UK Government is proposing radical plans to cut emissions in the wake of their failure to live up to their own manifesto on climate change.
“Domestically, we will need to introduce carbon rationing,” he said. “Individuals would get an allowance each year, which would gradually come down.”
Internationally, he would like the system, formalised in the policy known as Contraction and Convergence, developed by Aubrey Meyer of the Global Commons Institute. That would cut emissions of carbon-rich countries, while allowing those of carbon-poor countries to rise, until everyone has the same quota.
Perhaps you should sit down and read that last bit again. It’s a fundamental change to ‘business as usual’. And not a minute too soon.
Technorati Tags: carbon credits, climate change, CO2, eco, emissions reduction, emissions trading, environment, global warming, Industry, meltdown, politics, UK
The full details of the UK Government’s plan are spelled out in a separate article.
The moves to reduce emissions focus on:
- A stricter emissions cap for industry;
- Measures to encourage the uptake of biofuels in petrol;
- Tighter building regulations;
- Measures to improve household energy efficiency;
- A renewed emphasis on encouraging and enabling the general public, businesses and public authorities to help achieve the Government’s targets;
- Increased levels of microgeneration.
See the articles for more details. — DS
