The fix is in

My love for Scandinavians teeters on the brink: in collusion with the UK and the US, the Danes have circulated a secret document amongst the rich nations to work from during the Copenhagen conference.

• Kyoto (the only legal agreement on climate change) to be dumped
• Poor nations to have much lower emissions allowances than rich ones (so the rich, polluting ones can carry on polluting
• Climate change to be managed via the World Bank (the rich nations' loan shark) rather than the UN
• Poor nations' environmental strategies to be dictated by the rich ones

We expect the US to resist real change: even with a centrist President, it's a country controlled by a corporate élite. The UK, outside its own borders, is well-known as a manipulative and arrogant state: ministers say cuddly things and their civil servants operate ruthlessly to benefit the UK, even at the expense of the most vulnerable. Denmark, on the other hand, has a reputation as a calm, thoughtful nation. Sure, it's not as relaxed as Sweden, but it should be on the side of the angels. Now it definitely isn't. It's lined up with the usual suspects as yet another group of rich white guys bossing the poorer and darker around.

Business as usual.

Mind the gap

Lou has posted some stunning street art from New Zealand, which seems to be a very cool country. While Neal was there, he witnessed a Green MP turning up to parliament on a skateboard.

Actually, that's not cool. Adults on skateboards or BMXs, or permanently glued to games consoles are perpetual adolescents, addicted to toys, resistant to growing up and taking responsibility for the world outside their own gratification. It's amusing to subvert our image of politicians, but a skateboard is still a toy.

Move along, it's another politics and environment post

Being a rcalcitrant anarcho-syndicalist with Trotskyist leanings, I'm a huge fan of Ken MacLeod, the Scottish Trotskyist-ish science fiction author. He's a brilliant writer and stunningly intelligent.

However, I'm also very, very scared about what we've done to this planet and consequently what we're doing to its poor, mostly black inhabitants, none of whom have done anything to bring the eco-apocalypse down on our heads.

The problem is that the hard left has always seen industrialism as the solution to dragging the proletariat out of its suffering. Being green, to them, equates to being a smug, selfish and hypocritical bourgeois git. And you know, they're right - there are lots of Tory landowners taking long-haul flights to paradise islands, or weekend breaks, while telling the rest of us to recycle.

BUT - it's the poor who'll suffer first. Anyway, back to Ken MacLeod - here's his solution, expressed in his admiration for a techno-fix approach proposed by a learned professor. It's very appealing, and is also a fantasy of the climate change-denying right. The problem, of course, is that it's never this simple, consumption just is damaging, and the benefits won't extend to the poor.

For me, a highlight of a very engaging and informative weekend was a talk by Prof Colin McInnes, DSc FRAes FInstP FRSE FREng, titled 'Random Thoughts of a Techno-Utopist Running Dog'. The usual conception of sustainability, Prof McInnes argued, was a dangerous idea. Technological stagnation only means slower resource depletion. We need continuous technological progress to make new resources available. The idea that we should use less energy is outrageously inhumane and regressive. Most of humanity gets its energy from burning wood and dung. We need a vast increase in energy production. That means nuclear power, including new kinds of nuclear plant such as the Thorium Energy Amplifier. Nuclear waste is just inadequately burned nuclear fuel. We need to find ways of burning it all. Most reycling schemes are feel-good rather than do-good, condemning us to pre-industrial, manual rooting about in rubbish. We need plasma torches and mass spectrometers to really recover all the useful stuff in our waste. 'Humanity is the singularity. We are self-replicating smart matter.' To campaign against cheap flights to Prague while jetting across the world for eco-holidays in the Galapagos is naked class warfare. With synthetic genomics we can have carbon-neutral aviation even cheaper than today's travel.