Pirate's Cove

We’re doooooomed!

(UK Guardian) The lesson the world is learning the hard way from the financial crisis is that there is only one boat and we are all in it. To stay afloat, we need rules tough enough to stop systemic risks becoming systemic collapses. This lesson is as true for the environment as it is for the economy.

A key battle in the campaign to build an effective system of global rules will shortly take place in Durban, where the UN climate negotiations reopen at the end of this month. The International Energy Agency has set the scene, with the timely warning in its new World Energy Outlook that we are way off track to avoid dangerous climate change, and that the window for effective action is closing fast.

Expect to see continued silly and unhinged writings as we approach the time when bureaucrats and politicians take unnecessary fossil fueled flights halfway around the world to tell us that fossil fueled flights are bad. Of course, we get this same alarmist every year for about the past 15 years in November, dire predictions of doom and gloom, as the time of the IPCC working vacations in awesome vacation spots approaches.

The choice between what needs to be done but looks impossible, and what can be done but is clearly not enough, is as old as history. It lay behind the struggle between Churchill and Halifax as Britain faced Hitler’s tanks on the Channel coast. Nato’s success in Libya was conducted against a barrage of predictions that it would lead to years of stalemate. When there is no alternative, realism lies in expanding the limits of the possible, not in nourishing the delusion that something else might help.

So, not doing anything about trace amounts of a harmless gas necessary for life, which has been at higher levels than today for most of the Earth’s 4.5 billion years in existence, is like ignoring the threat from Nazi Germany.

There really is no plan B for the climate. A voluntary framework will not be enough to keep us within the 2C limit of manageable climate change. Unmanageable climate change will precipitate systemic collapses, including of our food and water security. Success or failure will depend on governments convincing investors that they are determined to enact the policies necessary to drive private capital towards a low-carbon future. In the boardroom a voluntary pledge from a government sounds rather like “maybe”. That’s why in the UK we have set legally binding carbon budgets through the Climate Change Act.

So, only Big Government can save us, and they must force it on their citizens? Sounds kinda like…..fascism. And those legally binding carbon budgets are going to leave people in the dark, freezing to death, in England, which is supposed to have yet another below average and snowy/icy winter. Have fun with that!

Crossed at Right Wing News and Stop The ACLU. Please sign the drill now petition.