Drastic times call for drastic measures

I read a horrifying newspaper article yesterday about a global warming tipping point: that several recording stations will never again dip below the 400 parts per million level of atmospheric CO2 and that whatever we do from this afternoon onwards, this isn't going to be changed.

I know, you're not horrified. You're bored. Or vaguely depressed. Or hungry. Whatever you are, you're not that bothered. Nor is anybody else, or anybody else that matters. Why? Because the climate's cycles are not comprehensible according to our own cycles, which tend to revolve around hanging washing out, working out whether to wear a vest, or getting elected in the next couple of years. Perhaps a few of us might worry slightly about our grandchildren, but faced with a problem this big, we'd rather assume that the cleverer next generation will make an app to fix it. It's complicated and invisible and quite frankly we can crank up the A/C or holiday somewhere else if that island has disappeared since you booked the flights.

Most people, locked in a room with some facts, would admit that climate change really is a problem, and that we (rich Westerners) are causing it. Even the ones with Range Rovers ('they're very safe for my kids' I hear them cry) might grin slightly guiltily and then mutter something about Chinese coal stations making any mitigation we might effect rather meaningless. Why are the Chinese (the world's biggest makers of solar power by the way) building coal power stations? To turn slave-produced raw materials into your iPhone.

So we know the science. We know the results. We know who's causing climate change: rich white people in the Northern Hemisphere (plus Australians). We know who's suffering first: poor brown people who haven't even had the luxury of the goods produced. We just don't have any way at all of persuading people that their behaviour is wreaking environmental destruction on the planet. We either don't care or we semi-consciously believe that a weekend break in Marbella after getting that sales report done is worth a medium-sized atoll in the Seychelles.

I have a solution. It's 'beatings'.

As an academic I'm ashamed to have to say this, but discussion, research, evidence: none of them has worked. We've spent long enough making the scientific case. Governments aren't interested because getting elected has never so far involved telling people that they're greedy bastards who need to adjust their selfish lifestyles: instead they fly off to glitzy conferences to sign vague memoranda of understanding that turn out to mean nothing, while they lobby to allow the car industry (for instance) to deliberately cheat the already lax laws in place. We need to get tough. Nobody can now claim that they don't know that a flight, an SUV or a piece of plastic tat represents an enormous amount of embodied energy whose burning involves the wilful destruction of some poor person's habitat. Yes, there's long-term work to be done to make our cities and infrastructures sustainable, but we don't have a long-term. We only have the short-term.

So we devise a tariff of beatings to accompany the price of these objects. Tax alone isn't enough: rich people see expense as a mark of privilege and luxury, and figures changing on a bank statement doesn't really impact them in the same way that an actual beating will. It's not as radical as what happens on Bethselamin, for example.

Imagine the scene. A flight from the UK lands at Sydney Airport. Awaiting the travellers is a chap with a clipboard. He is from the Solomon Islands, which have already sunk beneath the waves. (This is the other advantage of my plan: as land is lost or made uninhabitable, their inhabitants are employed to administer the Green Beatings, giving them an income and a sense of justice). He's pretty steamed. He liked life on the Solomons and feels that it's a bit unfair that his island disappeared so that Jordan Speith could swan around the world in a private jet to play golf. He goes through the list: miles travelled, purpose of visit, what class of cabin. Someone travelling in economy to be at the deathbed of a loved one gets off with a mild pummelling. The tourist gets a dead leg and some abrasions. The academic receives a Glasgow kiss and some nasty corduroy burns. The government minister gets kicked firmly and repeatedly in the shins. The KFC tax lawyer is introduced to Mr Bat and his friend Mr Knuckleduster. The arms dealer learns what it's like to be on the receiving end of her own products. Mr Speith learns just how many clubs can be carried inside a human caddy. The Daily Mail gossip writer is repeatedly run over by a group of immigrants (not for any environmental justice reasons, just because he deserves it). The beauty of this system is that it keeps free-marketeers happy. Nobody's interfering with freedom to travel or economic autonomy. We're just adding another element to the traveller's experience. It's simple, it's cheap and it's quick. You queue up, you take your beating and you go on your way, whether it's to take the salute for your Official Birthday or to bask on the beach, nursing your wounds and perhaps thinking about making a video-call next time or renting a narrowboat for your next holiday.

Aside from air travel, there are other simple ways to communicate what selfish and destructive pigs we are. As a pedestrian and cyclist I'm stunned by the number of SUVs on the road: massive, heavy, filthy vehicles with the power and solidity to drive up a mountain, used mostly to run over children outside schools. I propose that we start with a harmless black dye added to car exhaust so that we're visibly reminded that we are being deliberately poisoned by the car industry and those who choose to buy outsize and inefficient vehicles: perhaps shame at travelling round in a cloud of black smoke will make them think differently. After all, it was the Great Stink and the Pea-Soupers that persuaded British politicians to fix London's sewers and pass the Clean Air Acts.

If that doesn't work, we move to Phase 2: installing a jet that directly feeds exhaust gases into the cabins of motor vehicles. Plenty of people in SUVs do not give a damn for people outside their vehicle: let's see how they like experiencing road travel the way I have to on a bike. They might start lobbying for cleaner engines at that point. Finally, Phase 3 involves the supreme invocation of Libertarianism. Abolish all safety and luxury measures in motor vehicles. No more seat belts. No antilock brakes or roll cages. Engines that won't get you up to the speed limit. Gradually remove headlights, windscreens, heaters: the lot (and home air-conditioning is definitely banned: choosing to live somewhere requiring you to burn fuel to cool down air heated up by the reckless burning of fuel is pathologically insane). And abolish free access to the NHS if you crash. Before long, anyone who wants to travel privately is reduced to a glorified skateboard.

Extreme? Maybe. But I don't see anything else working at the moment. It might not be fun (except for the vengeful inhabitants of sunken lands) but life will be so much worse for your grandchildren if you don't shut up and take your beating now. I say all this, of course, more in sorrow than in anger. We've tried fixing things my way, and it hasn't worked.

So, who's with me?

(In the interests of openness: I've taken 13 flights in the past 7 years, multiple short ferry trips and haven't ever driven a car. I do have a huge vinyl collection ('"that's a paddlin") consume an awful lot of paper and have too many – though aging – electronic devices. I certainly wouldn't come out of the annual beatings assessment unscathed. I bought a duvet the other day which proclaimed 'British Wool' on the packaging. The very small print revealed that this British wool had been sent to China and back to become a duvet: unforgivable).

Hot Air for Uppal

I wrote to my MP about the UK Government's 'relaxed' attitude to environmental emissions and climate change, asking him to vote for a legally binding carbon target as part of the Energy Bill. As expected, he sent me a long, disingenuous letter which claimed that The Market Will Provide.

New stats are out. UK emissions rose by 4.5% last year, even in the depths of a recession, and without counting emissions outsourced to China and other manufacturing centres. We've missed our 2011 renewable energy commitment and have no chance of meeting our 2020 targets.

Cue another weary letter to Mr Uppal, complete with statistical sources, with no serious expectation of a meaningful response.

Dear Mr Uppal,thank you for your reply to my letter about the legally binding carbon targets.
Could you reflect again on this issue, given that the UK's emissions actually rose by 4.5% in 2012 (without counting 'outsourced' emissions), and the assessment that the UK is 25th of 27 EU member states in renewables contributions, is the only country which failed to meet its interim targets, and is calculated to miss its 2020 target set out in the 2009/28/EC Directive, otherwise known as the RES Directive?

What specific steps will the government take to address these two failures?
Hugs and Kisses,Plashing Vole.

Despite this - can I ask you all to write to your MPs along the same lines?

Oh yes: here's his latest Parliamentary humbug:

The hon. Gentleman is making some partisan points, so I want to add balance to the debate. I have been poor—dirt poor. I used to share my bedroom with my siblings and cousins. By modern descriptions, I would have been classified as homeless. His main argument is about foreign capital coming to the UK and London. Does he not think that that is symptomatic of people recognising that we have a Government who are making credible decisions and creating financial stability?

Not sure whether I should weep or laugh. 'Credible'? With borrowing sky-high, deficit reductions postponed to 2018 and the poor getting poorer and poorer, under a government determined to evict anyone with a box room and clear London of the labouring classes, while reducing taxes for the millionaires (he's too modest to mention that he's a millionaire, from property speculation). He is utterly despicable.  

The usual dispiriting Uppal rubbish

I wrote to my MP, Paul Uppal, asking him to vote for an amendment setting a maximum carbon production ceiling target by 2030. 

He voted against the amendment and wrote back with the usual boilerplate rubbish dictated by Tory HQ. Apparently rather than identifying a maximum we can safely pump into the atmosphere, we need to consider 

prevailing circumstances at the time, and in the context of the economy as a whole. 

This means, of course, kicking the can down the road and ensuring that the big polluters continue to pollute. What these Tories cannot comprehend is that there's a massive economic opportunity in building a renewable-energy economy. All they can see is their donors' perspectives, allied to their American-style rejection of climate science in its entirety. 'The context of the economy as a whole' actually means not impinging on the obscene profits made from wrecking the planet. But we all know what happened to other sectors of British industry that refused to invest in new technology: look at the decline of UK cars, aerospace, ship-building, electronics, chemicals and heavy industry. All gone to Japan, then China and soon Brazil and India. The same will happen with energy. 

Uppal tells me that:
The government is already pushing through ambitious reforms to overhaul existing old fossil fuel plants and replace them with new low carbon generation. 

It isn't. It plain isn't. Coal burning for power generation has increased over recent years from 31% of the energy mix to 40% because coal is cheap. The 'ambitious reform' to which Uppal refers is a failed competition to get Carbon Capture and Storage to work in one or two power stations. It hasn't worked and isn't likely to: it's just a little present to the coal burners rather than a serious idea. 

So it's clear that free-market solutions don't work: given the chance, polluters will opt for the cheapest substance, which happens to be the nastiest. Corporations don't invest in the future: they strip-mine the present because nobody gets bonuses and dividends for being responsible.

What else does Uppal say?

…new Contracts for Difference… will help developers secure the large upfront capital costs for low carbon infrastructure

This is Uppal's way of admitting that capitalism doesn't actually work. 

If you've never heard of a Contract for Difference, you're lucky. It's a nice shiny technical term for a bloody big bribe, or subsidy. Like with the railways, we've decided that we want an economic system which looks like the free market but is actually a state-subsidised racket. We need renewable energy. The government wants nuclear power stations. The private sector will build and operate them, but they can't build them on time or on budget (Flamanville and the Finnish one are both coming up to a decade late and the costs have soared into the stratosphere) and they can't operate them profitably, mostly because coal is so cheap. So they demand Contracts for Difference to cover the gap between the price at which they sell electricity and the price (plus profit) at which they produce electricity. 

The simple answer, of course, is for governments to own and run electricity generators. It would be cheaper: it's never been easier for governments to borrow money. But that would mean admitting that markets aren't the solution to everything. 

The other solution of course is to tax carbon, so that the cost of environmental damage is built in. But then we'd have to take climate change seriously, and think about changing our lifestyles. 

I won't bore you with the rest of Uppal's letter because it's misleading, disingenuous bullshit. He mentions the Green Deal, which is a) a bit of scam and b) a failure, and the Green Investment Bank, which isn't a bank and has a piddling amount of money which I strongly suspect will be wasted. It's just an attempt to promote markets rather than tackle climate change. And oh yes, it's only funded until 2015.

So let's skip to the end of Uppal's missive:

I feel that the Government is already taking the necessary action to decarbonise Britain's energy supply… the Government is determined to achieve our carbon goals, and will continue to work towards a low carbon future. 

OK. Let's put that to a nice, simple test. What happened to the UK's carbon emissions last year? 

The UK's emissions of climate-warming gases surged in 2012 as cheap coal replaced gas in power stations, official data revealed on Thursday. 

The UK's carbon dioxide emissions rose by 4.5% from 2011-12, with coal use in power stations jumping by 31%. Coal prices have dropped significantly as the US has exported the coal it no longer needs at homedue to the shale gas boom.  

But don't worry, we've got tough targets. Haven't we?

The UK is on track to miss its carbon targets in the 2020s, the government's advisers on climate change warned on Wednesday. Efforts to cut emissions are not happening quickly enough, and a looming "policy gap" will lead to a shortfall in the investment and infrastructure needed for a low-carbon economy, they said. 

But that's just a parliamentary report and will of course be entirely ignored. Because we're not dealing with facts here. Just more of Uppal's lies and evasions. Which is why he's climbing the greasy pole with alacrity.  

News Bounty

Good morning, readerinos! After yesterday's mammoth editing session (I reduced a paper from 19000 to 8500 words - each one soaked in blood), I'm back with a vengeance. Sort of. I've to write a lecture on Literature in the West Midlands (all suggestions welcome) for Saturday's promotional event. So far, I have a massive list, and I'm attempting to construct a spine for it, probably along the lines of 'The West Midlands: Culturally Impenetrable (And That's Just The Accent)'.

The other excitement of the day is the Chancellor's speech on the state of the British economy. Normally, one word would do ('screwed'), but his job is to repeat the very tired mantra 'we inherited a mess from the last Labour government' - they'll be his dying words - and pretend that slashing services to the poor and subsidising his rich mates with new airports and motorways is a reasonable and workable solution. No doubt he'll also say 'greenest government ever', despite the Tories' despicable secret support for Canadian oil sands production and his get-out-of-jail-free bribe to the worst polluters.

And the Leveson inquiry is ongoing! It's a banquet of news! Now to persuade the media students to have a look… Talking of them, I'm spending my lunchtime leafleting the little darlings to explain tomorrow's strike action. Free stickers to anyone who doesn't spit at me.

Anyway, in tribute to the victims of Torynomics, here's a song about us:

Sooo cute

Everyone's going on about how adorable that Star Wars VW advert is. So here's an even cuter one.

Stinking Lying Tory Scum

David Cameron, 14th May, 2010:

"I want this to be the greenest government ever" (with video).

"There is a fourth minister in this department who cares passionately about this agenda and that is me, the prime minister, right. I mean that from the bottom of my heart."

Cameron used the four-minute speech to formally announce the coalition's pledge to cut carbon emissions by 10% in the first 12 months. He said this would be helped by a new innovation to publish the energy being used by government departments in real time. "This is transparency in action to drive forward the cuts in carbon emissions. It's a new way of doing climate change, it's a new way of doing politics, it's in the spirit of our age and I think it will make a very big difference," he said.

Caroline Spelman, Environment Secretary, 20th May 2010:

"It will be the greenest Government we have ever had," 

George Osborne, Chancellor, July 2008

"This will be the greenest government ever".

16th August 2010:

The coalition is watering down a commitment to tough new environmental emissions standards, raising the possibility of dirty coal-fired power stations such as Kingsnorth going ahead.

Green groups are aghast that a flagship policy called for in opposition by both Lib Dems and Tories, and which they last year tried to force on the Labour government, will now not be implemented in the coalition's first energy bill to be published this year.

Introducing a so-called "environmental performance standard" (EPS) for power companies would have restricted greenhouse gas emissions from coal and gas plants and encouraged companies wishing to build to use more efficient technology.

The introduction of an EPS was personally championed by David Cameron, George Osborne and Nick Clegg when in opposition; their opposition to Kingsnorth became something of a cause célèbre – and even features in the coalition agreement – but was opposed by energy companies and Tory backbenchers.

These pollution restrictions were promised by both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. They were inserted into a Labour Government energy bill by the Tories as an amendment. They were written into the coalition agreement between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. 

Now they've been dumped the minute the lobbyists get through the doors. I'm getting used to the relentless contempt for the poor, the young and the regional, but I'm still shocked by the naked dishonesty of these bastards. I'm already despondent about our pathetic response to climate change, but now I'm boilingly angry. 


Oh yes, and they're planning to sell our nature reserves and reduce environmental protection too…

Joined-up government, no 985.

David Cameron: we're going to make this the 'greenest government ever'.
Caroline Spelman: we're going to be the 'greenest government ever'.

They've already axed the Sustainable Development Commission.
What's next?

Energy and climate change secretary, Chris Huhne, said: "Electric and low-carbon cars are fun to drive and essential to meet our climate targets. That's why we'll need a massive increase in the number of electric and clean green cars on our roads. Because this is new technology the government needs to step in to kick-start the market, which is why today's initiative is vital."

Oh yes: cut the grants for electric vehicles from £230m to £43m. That's an 80% cut. That'll really encourage people to buy electric.

Greenest. Government. Ever.

The little darlings

I'm not a parent, perhaps mercifully ("Shut up, and eat your Guardian"), but even a neutral observer like me is surely right to despair confronted with the kind of parenting that passes as acceptable;

item 1: little girl wearing a t-shirt bearing the legend 'born to be bored'. The poor child. She wasn't born to be bored - you earn that by getting a job, much later. In the meantime, why not try to amuse and educate your kids? Unless, of course, this was a subversive existentialist statement, and the pink colour referred to the inevitable gender-stereotyping which leaves girls to play with dolls and keep house.

item 2: the local paper declares that not only are kids going to a 'prom', as though this is somewhere in Nebraska, but that one child's parents are sending her there in a helicopter, because nothing spreads love like massively polluting your home town, scaring everyone's pets and deafening the neighbours in the pursuit of making your friends jealous. The child isn't to blame - she's a product of her disgusting, arrogant, selfish parents.

One disgusting peddler of pollution says this:

Your school prom is your last chance to make an impression on your classmates and one of your last chances to enjoy that magical feeling of being on top of the world with the rest of your life in front of you and endless possibilities open to you.

Yes, that's right kids. Rub your friends' and teachers' faces in this because let's face it, your parents are richer than they are, and life's shit from now on.

Not only will people have to look twice when you show them your pics

That's right. In twenty years' time when you've run out of conversation, you can show your golfing 'friends' pictures of your last day at school, and they'll be really, really impressed because you had rich selfish parents.

Not only that:

Plus, a helicopter does not seat upwards of ten or twenty people like many party bus limousines your friends will be hiring for their prom night. Therefore, you and your date have the chance to enjoy each other’s company and your special prom night flight without any interruptions. 

What they're really saying is: 'You're legal. Get pissed. Join the mile-high club. Not even your parents can stop you from way down there'.

Though there may be another option for your special prom night flight, another aspect of the American school experience is hinted at here:

So what better way to capture that feeling of being on top of the world, and go out on a high, than to arrive at your school prom in a helicopter?

you’ll also have the opportunity to take some shots of your home, your town and even your classmates, from on high.

Shades of Vietnam shot through with any one of a number of high school massacres… They've already explicitly said that this is the high point of your life. If school's been rubbish, why not approach the Prom Night with Death From Above in mind? You could play Ride of the Valkyries while taking 'some shots'.

It's enough to make me acquire ground-to-air missiles.

It's a Gas…

This is utterly shocking. Neal sent me a video of a new and expanding energy source: pump chemicals down into the water table to extract natural gas. Pay people to do this on their land. Pollute their water supply for ever. Poisoned people, poisoned land.

Watch out for 6.40 minutes in when the guy lights the water coming out of his tap.

Watch the full episode. See more NOW on PBS.

Live in London - save me money!

Despite the constant stream of greenwash, the UK is repeatedly proved to be the dirtiest country in Europe. Despite having abolished heavy industry, coal fires and mining, London in particular breaks all EU regulations about clean air, thanks to its citizens' demand for Chelsea tractors and its political leaders' inaction. After several years of warnings, unlimited fines are about to be imposed.

 A study (pdf) commissioned by Boris Johnson, mayor of London, calculated that more than 4,300 deaths are caused by poor air quality in the city every year, costing around £2bn a year.

But on the plus side, I'll be able to stop sending birthday cards and presents to my sister, cousins and friends a couple of years earlier.

The Sky is Falling

Have a good weekend everybody. Try not to inhale too much volcanic ash. I intend to read my extensive collection of cataclysm literature (used to be Commie Nukes, now it's the far more convincing Eco-apocalypse) in preparation for The Rapture.

I've just finished Miller's Sunshine State: a mix of (very deliberately signalled) Ballard and The Bourne Identity - excellent Iraq-derived stuff with a very downbeat ending and I'm starting Robert Edric's Salvage, a post-collapse novel set in the flooded North of England. Looks good so far. I've just finished Davies's weirdo Canadian campus novel Rebel Angels and Aldiss's sex-fixated fictionalised autobiography, The Hand-Reared Boy (how an SF writer called Brian managed to find so much material from his sex life is beyond me). The fun ends next week though - I've got to rewrite my Anne paper for journal publication and do the same for my O. M. Edwards paper for publication as a book chapter. Oh, and teach. And mark.

Stay safe out there.

Tapped

Your ever-so-pure bottled water is a major contributor to global warming and environmental degradation. In the UK, where the tap water is clean and cheap, there's no excuse for this bourgeois selfishness.

Bloombox

I also want one of these - if they're as good as claimed.

The Bloom Box is a block of fuel cells which claim to be twice as efficient as other energy generators: 1 Box can power 100 homes. If it runs on fossil fuels, it produces half the carbon of other methods. If it runs on renewable energy, it's pretty much carbon neutral!

The Hegemon could easily run on one or two units (around £400,000 each, payback within 5 years). I could run my house easily on a mini-one. Google and EBay are already using them.

They're all I've bloody got to eat!

Britain's juniper bushes are declining and only the scientists who spend most of their time designing more efficient holocausts can save them. What a lovely little PR puff. 

Early morning moron

Hello campers. I'm looking forward to 12 hours in the office today. Why have I been here since 8 a.m.? Because this idiot took home the marked essays rather than the unmarked ones… so have to finish 16 rather involved scripts as well as teach. Aarrrghhhh.

Still, the day started with amusement: there's a fuss (in the stupid rightwing press) about a toy hamster which is meant to sing Jingle Bells, but apparently sings 'Paedophile'. Radio 4's flagship news show, Today, was so amused by this that it tracked down a recording. It doesn't sing 'paedophile', more like mmmmmmphile. Close enough for the kneejerkers.

What a very surreal start to the day.

In the world of proper journalism, the Guardian and 56 other newspapers have marked the start of the Copenhagen conference with a joint editorial setting out the case for serious and urgent action. I know we shouldn't need to rehearse it again, but the deliberate, irresponsible, selfish, short-sighted, greedy and cynical machinations of fossil-fuel pushers, Tories, repressive oil-dictatorships and other capitalists (shame on you, Canada and Australia amongst others, including us, but especially the USA) have muddied the waters so much that people are either disillusioned with, cynical about or bored by, the subject.

Let's be clear. In the short term, food prices are going to go up. Poor, black people are going to starve. Then the already destabilised weather systems will deteriorate further. More, poor, black people are going to die - drowned, displaced, starved, killed in wars over productive land and water. After that, amidst the mass extinctions, freak weather, heatwaves and rising tides, Western nations will spend their money on keeping poor, black people out of the temperate zones. It won't (and shouldn't) work.

After that, life will get immeasurably worse but I, mercifully, will be very much dead.

Copenhagen is already dubious - horsetrading for countries to justify keeping their emissions up as high as possible rather than taking a lead, but it's a start. We might manage to keep temperature rises to 2 degrees C - leading only to awful consequences rather than catastrophic.

Three Cheers for Stoke-on-Trent

I've detailed the joys of Stoke recently. I left out its history of far-right politics, the massive unemployment, its sheer, defiant ugliness and Port Vale.

Now it's lauded in the national press for being the first city in the UK to sign up to the 10:10 pledge - to reduce emissions by 10% during 2010 - a really tough challenge in city destroyed by obsessive and socially-destructive road building (take six towns federated into a city, then stick a ring-road round each of them!), and formerly dependent on heavy industry (now gone, so no easy wins there).

Politicians always come out with this rubbish about bright green futures regenerating cities marooned by history (shades of Harold Wilson), but it might, might happen this time.

Oh, and Cynical Ben's wrong. Oatcakes are great. They're like wholemeal chapatis.

Doomed, we're all doomed!

I'm not joking. The only levity to be gained from this very credible report (abstract only) is that by the time we hit 6C above norm (in 2100), I will be dead. It's sad that the best I can hope for in my life is that it will be over by the time that mass human, animal and vegetable extinction occurs. Still, it'll make life interesting for our children and grandchildren.

The media coverage suggests that it's possible to avert this utter disaster - but the scientist points out that emissions have risen over the past decade, by 29%. Every opportunity we're given to take climate change seriously, we've avoided. Our politicians pay lip service and we chuck the occasional newspaper in the recycling bin, but as a race, we don't really believe that what's going to happen will happen. It's too far off or too complicated.

My students think it's hilarious (or embarrassing) that I don't drive and that I'm genuinely terrified of the consequences. They just don't care enough to change their lives - and to be fair, we need to change society far more radically than swapping to recycled loo paper or unplugging iPod chargers.

The current plan is to try to limit temperature change to 2C above the norm - leading to aberrant weather, migration, some extinctions: bad, but not awful. Can we do it? Can we bollocks:

"This is very different to the trend we need to be on to limit global climate change to 2C [the level required to avoid dangerous climate change]." That would require CO2 emissions from all sources to peak between 2015 and 2020 and that the global per capita emissions be decreased to 1 tonne of CO2 by 2050. Currently the average US citizen emits 19.9 tonnes per year and UK citizens emit 9.3 tonnes.

Now back to an Othello lecture - it fills in the time before I gratefully shuffle off this mortal coil.

Kafka, Carter-Ruck and Trafigura

I posted earlier about The Guardian being banned from reporting that an MP it couldn't name was asking a parliamentary question it couldn't repeat, at a time it couldn't mention, despite a constitutional ruling that newspapers could repeat anything said in Parliament (MPs are exempt from libel laws by Parliamentary Privilege, so that they can name and shame wrongdoers). In the comments section, Ewar and I posted the Twitter/blog rumours that the MP was Paul Farrelly (good Labour guy from Newcastle-under-Lyme) and the question concerned Trafigura, a toxic waste company which doesn't want any more attention devoted to its payment of lots of money to the 30,000 Africans it poisoned by dumping toxic waste in Ivory Coast.

This case raises a serious question of freedom of speech. There's no point an MP raising a point if his constituents and other citizens can't hear about it and discuss it. Lawyers shouldn't be able to use Britain's awful libel laws to silence any criticism of their clients.

The Guardian has now presumably won a court hearing, as it's identifying the matter in the 'breaking news' ticker. More background here.

Update: The Guardian's full story here.

This place is full of selfish dumbasses

There's a piece on Chinese power generation in today's Guardian: it says that China has very inefficient stations at the moment, but that they're massively altering their economy and industry to make it green.

Cue some idiot called Birdyboy in the comments section, who encapsulates the selfishness of (I suspect) quite a large proportion of the country. This is why we're going to hell.

Yes, and you guys want to stop us flying and eating meat, so we have miserable little lives while the rest of the world keeps on turning. people are not going to stop existing, so stop trying to ruin our fun with pointless new taxes and bans. if we are screwed, then we mat as well enjoy the time we have left. Any anyway, if any a country could do with being 2 degrees hotter it is surely us?

I may as well give up

Yes, David Mitchell not only shares my opinions, he writes about them much better. This week's column was on cricket, holidays and air travel - I don't disagree with a single word, though I'd be a little harsher in the selfish bastards who think that unrestricted air travel is their right. Being a fan of the 1930s, I've no compunction about consigning people into camps and I regularly fantasise about using grenade launchers on SUVs.

Neal (posting there as Manuelelo for some reason) makes the reasonable point that it's the frequent long weekenders who cause the damage rather than a worn-out family taking the kids away once a year (a point Cynical Ben has made too), though he also thinks that encountering new cultures makes us empathise more. Really? Neal: I give you the British Empire, and any of the other empires you care to mention. I also reference the British in Spain - tucking into fish and chips, watching Sky, speaking English and STILL hating foreigners…

I may visit Germany in August: I shall be taking the train, and considering the journey as part of my holiday.