"KYOTO IS ILLOGICAL": UNITED NATIONS U-TURN ANGERS GREENS

Rich nations should be absolved from the need to cut emissions if they pay developing countries to do it on their behalf, a senior UN official has said. The controversial suggestion from Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), has angered environmental groups. They say climate change will not be solved unless rich and poor nations both cut emissions together. But Mr de Boer said the challenge was so great that action was needed now.

The UN's binding global climate agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, currently requires industrialised nations to reduce the majority of emissions themselves. But Mr de Boer said this was illogical, adding that the scale of the problem facing the world meant that countries should be allowed to invest in emission cuts wherever in the world it was cheapest. "We have been reducing emissions and making energy use more efficient in industrialised countries for a long time," he told BBC News. "So it is quite expensive in these nations to reduce emissions any more. "But in developing nations, less has been done to reduce emissions and less has been done to address energy efficiency," Mr de Boer observed. "So it actually becomes economically quite attractive for a company, for example in the UK, that has a target to achieve this goal by reducing emissions in China." He said rich nations should be able to buy their way out of 100% of their responsibilities - though he doubted that any country would want to do so.

Green groups said the proposal was against the spirit of the UN, which agreed that wealthy countries - who were responsible for climate change - should do most to cure it. Mike Childs from Friends of the Earth said: "This proposal simply won't deliver the cuts we need in time. The scientists are telling us that we need to cut carbon dioxide (CO2) by 50-80% by 2050. "Unless rich countries start to wean themselves off fossil fuels right away this won't happen." Doug Parr of Greenpeace was equally critical of Mr de Boer's suggestion. "The current trading system is not delivering emissions reductions as it is," he said. "Expanding it like this to give rich countries a completely free hand will simply not work."

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It is the Greenies who keep America dependant on Arab oil

Just about everyone claims the U.S. must urgently become "energy independent," yet at the same time just about every policy that may actually serve that goal is met with environmentalist opposition. That contradiction has impeded the Bush Administration's attempts to increase domestic energy production. And even the modest progress so far may be blocked because litigation is driving the conflict out of politics and into the courts.

To see this trend at work, look north to Alaska, where lawsuits are blocking an offshore drilling program. Last week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted an emergency stay that will suspend all operations until at least September, when the court will hear full arguments. The decision noted that the litigants--environmental pressure groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council--had shown "a probability of success on the merits." Uh-oh.

This is bad news for Shell, whose three-year exploration program in the Beaufort Sea was green-lighted by the Department of the Interior in February. The company planned to sink up to four temporary wells this summer to determine the available resources. But there's a limited open-water window before the winter ice moves back in, so the Ninth Circuit could delay work for a year, even if it decides in Shell's favor.

The worst ramifications, however, could hit environmental and regulatory law. The greens argue that the environmental review process of the Interior agency responsible for domestic energy leasing, the Minerals Management Service, was incomplete. Allegedly, there are not enough protections for bowhead whales as they migrate to their winter grounds. They also say that the program could affect other wildlife and that there could be oil spills.

In fact MMS conducts a comprehensive environmental review. Ultimately, it found that the project would have "no significant impact" on the ecosystem. The agency has also spent more than $20 million studying the feeding and migratory behavior of the bowhead whales in the Beaufort Sea. Based on that research, it attached additional approval conditions on Shell beyond the statutory law designed to mitigate any possible effects.

Part of the environmental complaint was that Shell would disrupt the Inupiat Eskimos' annual subsistence whale hunt. But the company brokered a "conflict avoidance agreement" that will stop all work for part of the migration season. As for oil spills, the two drill ships Shell would deploy were specially engineered to operate safely in the conditions of the Beaufort Sea. Plus, they'd be attended by an armada of barges to respond in case of an accident.

Even this painstaking and very expensive process wasn't enough. In short, it's hard to imagine any further precautions that would satisfy the environmentalists--short of a total ban on offshore drilling, which of course is their real objective. The environmentalists are pursuing a litigation strategy against every government agency involved. They have appealed decisions of the Environmental Protection Agency, threatened to sue the National Marine Fisheries Service, among others, and even sued to retroactively roll back all lease sales. With the Ninth Circuit, they finally found a court partner amenable to their demands.

Precisely because of the stringency of the review process, the environmentalists are developing some creative legal theories. The 1970 National Environmental Policy Act requires an Environmental Impact Statement. This orders the government to consider a "range of alternatives" when issuing any permits, and then to choose the one that offers "maximum protection" to the environment. The greens say that the option that provides "maximum protection" is not drilling. Ergo, the courts should stretch the statute to ban any exploration whatsoever.

But Congress and the executive are charged with determining what areas should be opened to development, balancing the public interest with environmental concerns. The law then provides for "maximum protection" within that context, which MMS has clearly done here.

The public interest in this case is domestic energy. The U.S. is one of the only countries in the world that chooses to lock up its natural resources. Since 2003, the Administration and Congress have lifted the federal moratoria on a few select areas of the Outer Continental Shelf. The Beaufort basin, which is estimated to hold 27.2 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 8.2 billion barrels of recoverable oil, was one of those. A successful exploratory program could open a new frontier of energy.

That public purpose is what drives the greens bonkers, so they're trying to create a legal backstop to prevent any Administration from doing what President Bush has done. The Shell case shows that even a long and expensive effort to address every conceivable concern can still be undone by lawsuits. If anyone wants to know why we're still "dependent on foreign oil," this is it.

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FOREST FIRES MAY DESTROY EUROPE'S EMISSION TRADING SCHEME

The European Union's emissions trading scheme could be pushed into meltdown by a repeat of this summer's forest fires in southern Europe if proposals to include woodlands within the scheme are approved, according to carbon traders and green groups. EU leaders agreed to examine the inclusion of forests in the emissions trading scheme in June after a lobbying campaign by countries with big landmasses, such as France and Poland, who could gain from the change.

Begun in 2005, the scheme has placed a cap on the amount of greenhouse gas industry can produce in an attempt to fight climate change. Businesses that exceed their cap must purchase permits in the form of tradable carbon credits. Under the proposed plan, forests and other land would be credited as stores of carbon, allowing landowners to sell the resulting permits on to factories that emit gases.

Many in the carbon market fear that fires or drought could result in a huge release of stored carbon as trees die, triggering a jump in the carbon price and crippling the trading system. Stephan Singer, who advises the European Commission on behalf of the conservation group WWF, said: "If you give the credit you have to debit too. You are cheating the atmosphere if losses from fires are not debited." Including forests could also flood the market with cheap credits, rendering the price useless as a means of encouraging businesses to cut emissions. Last year, the carbon price collapsed when it was discovered that governments had issued too many permits.

FULL STORY here




Childish Greenie "protesters"

Hard as it may seem to believe, I was a Direct Action Man in my time. In the 1980s I went on many a march, protest, picket line, blockade and occupation - in support of striking miners, nurses and students, against wars, invasions and police brutality, in defence of abortion rights, immigrants and free speech. And I would not apologise for any of it. Anybody with an idealistic bone in his youthful body ought to have taken some direct action, along with the drugs. However, at the risk of sounding like a grey talking head on the "Grumpy Old Marxists" show, I feel obliged to point out that young eco-protester puppies today don't know they are born, are degrading the good name of direct action, and would not know a police state if they found one in their muesli.

The news has been full of spokespersons from the Camp for Climate Action at Heathrow comparing their campaign of direct action with noble struggles of the past. One summed up the camp's aims as being "to show it's possible and pleasurable to live sustainably" (the joys of the composting toilet), and "to show that non-violent direct action works. Civil disobedience has in the past led to things like black people getting the vote."

Grow up and get an education. The campaign against Heathrow expansion bears no comparison to those that led to "things like black people getting the vote". Direct action is neither good nor bad in principle. It is just a tactic, used by all manner of protest movements. What matters most are the political aims and outlook informing the protests. In the past, direct action was employed by people fighting to defend their own interests - working people struggling for jobs and better pay, women demanding the vote, black people seeking civil rights. The pursuit of self-interest was the driving force for political change. Others such as we on the Left supported their struggles, but we acted in solidarity, not as self-appointed substitutes for the miners or disadvantaged minorities.

Today, by contrast, to take political action in your own interests seems frowned upon as greedy, even sleazy. Instead, the Heathrow protesters insist that they are acting altruistically "on behalf of" others, speaking for the "voiceless" - the poor of the developing world, unborn generations, or simply the planet. A picture from the weekend captures the essence of this direct-action-by-indirect-proxy. It shows a group of white, apparently well-heeled protesters, beneath a banner declaring "We are armed . . . only with peer-reviewed science" (we went armed with political arguments), while they carry huge posters of the supposed victims of climate change on whose behalf they are protesting - mostly impoverished-looking Africans and Asians.

Call me an old cynic, but these protesters look like the ones cynically exploiting the plight of the poor in the developing world, dragging them symbolically in front of the cameras to act as a stage army justifying their march through a field in suburban England. Because, of course, you don't really give the "voiceless" a voice - you speak and act for them, whether they want you to do so or not. Exactly how many of the impoverished global masses have been consulted about the Heathrow camp set up on their behalf? Did those whose placards boldly declared "You Fly - They Die" ask the millions of Africans and Asians who are dying to fly? And can we be certain that the hungry-looking people depicted in those posters really agree with one camp spokeswoman that "we have had enough of the prioritisation of economic growth over the future of the planet"?

Once, when I debated these issues with George Monbiot, a leading green writer, he declared that they had to take action for the sake of "the unborn". I pointed out that this apparently democratic mandate amounted to signing themselves a blank cheque to do as they see fit, since the unborn were hardly in a position to disagree or vote them down from the moral high ground.

The "grassroots" protest movement at Heathrow turns out to be an egotistical posture from self-appointed saviours who imagine that they are floating above the ignorant masses, acting for the planet. It might seem odd that such high-profile protests take place at a time of low-level interest in politics. In fact they are two sides of the same coin. Gestures of disengaged direct action, such as occupying the BAA car park in the middle of the night, are not trying to win an argument with anybody. They are media stunts designed to demonstrate that the protesters are parked on the side of the angels, armed with the (self) righteous sword of "peer-reviewed science" to smite anybody in their path.

This apparent taste for the dictatorship of an expert elite over the great unaware might be rather sinister if we took them seriously. But despite the high-minded declarations, these protesters are only playing at politics. There were not many clown outfits in evidence among the Sunday-best suits on the 1963 March on Washington.

Yet such are the rising levels of self-deluded preciousness among the protesters that some seem to believe they were subjected to historic levels of police oppression, because some officers "acted aggressively". They might care to look at what happened in the past when protests challenged the Establishment - the direct action did not remain nonviolent for long once the riot police started swinging. By contrast, eco-protests are now so mainstream and respectable that they are treated with kid gloves rather than the old iron fist. The only ones to receive that treatment in recent years were the pro-hunting protesters outside Parliament - they were the "wrong" sort of conservationists.

The last time there was real direct action at Heathrow was exactly two years ago, when the in-flight catering firm Gate Gourmet sacked 670 mostly Asian women workers, and baggage handlers and other ground staff walked out to support them. The activists who now march behind pictures of hard-pressed Asian women were nowhere to be seen. But the logic of their protests is that all such self-interested airport workers should be sacked. Such is the difference between direct action taken in solidarity, and that staged out of sanctimony.

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It's official: the British masses are not gullible

A new British government survey suggests that lots of us have an agnostic or atheist attitude to the cult of environmentalism

In spring 2007, researchers commissioned by the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) interviewed 3,600 English people for an average of 51 minutes each about green issues (1).

As ever with market surveys, the content and style of questions asked, and the claims made in response to them, should be taken with a large pinch of salt. Still, the researchers' findings, which were published yesterday, are very revealing. Despite the incessant political and media barrage to make us all change our ignorant habits in relation to the environment, it appears that the English often keep a cool head about global warming. However, the results suggest that, at the same time, we now feel enough personal guilt to adopt, in everyday life, many of the pious rituals of environmental correctness. We are quite rational about climate change doom-mongering, and yet we're happy to change our behaviour in response to it.

Remarkably, people are less concerned about the environment than they were when DEFRA last conducted a similar survey, in 2001. Then, when asked without prompting what were the most important issues for the government to fix, 25 per cent mentioned the environment; today the figure is down to 19 per cent.

Thankfully, too, today's popular sense of impotence in the face of impending doom is very modest: only 17 per cent strongly agreed or tended to agree that it's too late to do anything about climate change. And 67 per cent said that humanity can find ways to solve environmental problems. A striking 19 per cent said they were convinced that scientists would find a solution to global warming without people having to make big changes to their lifestyles.

In the face of all the finger-wagging injunctions to change our carbon-producing behaviour, about a quarter of the survey respondents didn't believe that their lifestyles contributed to climate change; 18 per cent said that going green `takes too much effort'. More than two thirds said that buying food produced locally, rather than food produced abroad, would have little impact on the UK's contribution to climate change.

On the flipside, a solid 75 per cent said that more insulation and less energy use in the home, along with recycling and using cars and planes less, could have a major impact on the UK's contribution to climate change. But this sentiment was predicated on the idea that, for that kind of impact to happen, most people in UK would have to adopt such measures. And here, some commendable realism was on display. While more than half the respondents held that a lot or quite a lot of people would be willing to recycle their rubbish more or take new steps on the insulation of their homes, just 17 per cent thought that many would be willing to drive less - and only 13 per cent thought many would be willing to fly less.

Greens would say these attitudes show selfishness or cynicism. I think they show a refreshing refusal to tow the official line on climate. It's great to hear that 24 per cent threw PC etiquette to the winds and insisted they `didn't really' want to cut down on their use of cars. Intransigence about flying was even higher: 32 per cent didn't really want to cut down on their use of planes. A sizable minority of English people wants to get out more and refuses, it seems, to conform to today's green orthodoxy. And how many felt guilty about taking short-haul flights? Just 17 per cent.

However, the more worrying aspect of DEFRA's research concerns the claims people made about their own behaviour. Judging by their responses, people appear to have bought and then mentally internalised the view that it is consumers, rather than employers, who are to blame for environmental problems. However much rationality suggests that serious changes to levels of carbon emissions, for example, can only be made in the domain of energy supply, today's culture has successfully encouraged a majority to go through the irrational motions of saving the planet through cutting back on their personal energy demand (2).

Of course, when 71 per cent said they were personally recycling more, that may have been because their local council insists on such a policy. And when more than half said they had moved to low-energy light bulbs, or had taken to switching off equipment when not in use, that may reflect misguided hopes that they will significantly lower electricity bills, rather than still more misguided hopes that these actions will make a difference to the Earth's temperature. No fewer than 81 per cent of those surveyed strongly agreed or tended to agree that people have a duty to recycle.

The survey's seemingly contradictory findings are revealing. On one hand, people are quite robustly sceptical about the need to prioritise the environment over other important issues, and they believe that, with the help of science, we can deal with changes in the climate. And many of us do not believe that we are responsible for climatic doom, whatever the greens tell us. On the other hand, people claim to be carrying out new eco-rituals, such as recycling more and wasting less food. This shows up the religious character of environmentalism: we get on with our lives, but we feel guilty about doing so, and we try to offset that guilt by doing things we know won't make a great deal of difference. Quite a few people seem to have an atheist or agnostic attitude towards the cult of environmentalism, but that hasn't prevented them from believing that to consume is so sinful that one must perform Hail Marys at all hours of the day. That kind of saintliness has no impact on environmental degradation, of course. But it does degrade our minds, our conversations and our ambitions.

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The Lockwood paper was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film. It is a rather confused paper -- acknowleging yet failing to account fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even be the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and a very detailed critique here for more on the Lockwood paper

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, DISSECTING LEFTISM, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL and EYE ON BRITAIN. My Home Pages are here or here or here. Email me (John Ray) here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

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