This whole thing is not really helped by hysterical media reporting though. Witness the disgraceful BBC report today on the draft climate bill. They took the 60% emission reduction by 2050 and then applied a 60% reduction to an "average household" to give people a vision of overnight losing their car, their lightbulbs, foreign holidays, all their electrical appliances (including the kettle!) and all their domestic heating - so, a future of shivering in the dark
The message presented is of course that this reduction is impossible to achieve, so why not just give up? Defeatism, cynicism and sensationalism all in one package.
They did in a separate report mention that much of the reductions would have to come through changes in industry and energy production - but this was not related to the dark hair-shirt item. They have repeated through the day "We
allhave to cut our emissions by 60%" What, individually? All at once? Soon? Apart from low energy lightbulbs little mention was made of the role new technologies have to play.
Pricing mechanisms and punitive taxation that affects the poor most are not ways that are going to be acceptable
or effective in reducing emissions. Mind you, the fair solutions - carbon rationing and quotas, for example, are also guaranteed to send the DM brigades into paroxysms about nanny state, civil liberties, anti-competetiveness etc ....
If you accept AGW exists, then you have to have a strategy to combat it. Just rejecting everything anyone suggests is not an option. What is really needed is a strategy that gets people working together on the common cause and is fair and just. But we can't 'wait for the revolution' to attack this problem, just as we can't 'wait for the revolution' to deal with AIDS, or homelessness or the slow destruction of the NHS. We have to use the tools we have and address the issue in the best way we can in an imperfect world. If we can grow some elements of a new society along the way or prepare for political change, then great.
If the BBC wanted to really scare the public, rather than just play at "look at the terrible life the government have planned for you and aren't they unrealistic" type politics, they would more frequently broadcast the predictions of Stern and the IPCC (who are coming from the bottom end of very conservative predicting on this topic) about what we are likely to face.
We can look at this in terms of how it relates to the world of Urban politics board posters -the situation that is emerging will alter
everything you know or think you have a political handle on. What price the tedious interminable debates on immigration if it comes about that there are 10, 20, 30
million plus environmental refugees heading for these shores? What will all these debates over the uselessness of the left look like when the global economy really hits the rocks and the fascists start to gain an even larger audience, and what price our civil liberties when the frightened and threatened demand protection against a world in chaos......
Sorry if this depresses you, but people need to wake up to the scale of what is facing us. I used to see this as just another issue, I was even prone to scepticism, but once you actually look at the science and what the majority of scientists are saying it is clear that this is something of an entirely different order
