by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
In the beginning of August 2010 Lord Lawson, aka Nigel Lawson of Margaret Thatcher government fame, stated councils in the UK should do "absolutely nothing" to tackle climate change unless a stringent global deal on reducing carbon emissions is reached through the United Nations, which includes developing as well as developed countries.
It is hardly possible, I think, to talk more tosh than that, except for denying that the climate is changing.
Insisting that such an agreement would be unlikely due to India and China's need to rapidly increase economic growth – in order to bring tens of millions of citizens out of poverty – the chairman of the Global Warming Policy Foundation claimed that town halls were wasting resources by promoting renewable energy schemes and green initiatives.
"For now, energy is carbon based because it is cheaper than anything else and it makes no sense to decarbonise unless everybody is doing it; it's lunacy to go it alone when China is building a new coal power station every week," he said, speaking at the LGA annual conference.
This shows that Nigel Lawson, now Lord Lawson, is still talking as much garbage as he did when he was in the Thatcher government.
"It would cost the British economy £50bn a year up to 2050 to meet the requirements of the UK Climate Change Act. Local authorities should do absolutely nothing to tackle climate change. Your money could be put to far greater use."
Lord Lawson said that northern Europe would actually greatly benefit from continued warming and urged public servants to focus on adaptation rather than mitigation. He also highlighted Met Office figures showing that global temperatures had not risen at all in the last decade – although, he admitted they had gone up by 0.75 degrees over the last 150 years since the industrial revolution.
While it is becoming common knowledge by know, methinks, that politicians, in the main, and especially those like Lawson, live in a different universe, and not necessarily a parallel one even, what he has been saying there should, in fact, prove this theory. How removed from reality can one actually be?
Countering his views, founding member of the Tyndall Centre professor Andrew Watkinson told delegates that 10 years was too short a period to identify weather trends and this explained the stabilisation in temperature.
"The climate science is sound and last winter was the second warmest globally despite the bad weather experienced here in the UK," said Watkinson, also a professional fellow of the University of East Anglia.
"We could see temperature rises in the future of between 1-4 degrees as a result of greenhouse gases – way beyond what humans on earth have experienced before, so local authorities have to take on the science and show leadership with new forms of energy as well as adaptation and mitigation measures."
Watkinson revealed that some scholars thought the global population could shrink from six billion to one billion if the worst effects of climate change came to fruition and parts of the southern hemisphere became inhabitable.
But Lord Lawson rejected these claims insisting that more extreme warming periods had occurred during Medieval and Roman times and that sea levels were not rising rapidly any more.
"There has certainly been skulduggery with the science; it's totally one-sided – ignoring the benefits of global warming and exaggerating the downsides," he added. "Climate change is like a new religion and there are some people who see it as a way to undermine capitalism."
While I must agree with Lord Lawson that the climate change issue has become something of a mantra and is being handled with religious zeal, to the detriment of the rest of the environmental issues, to all intents and purposes it would appear that man has a lot to do with the changing climate.
However, the way Lord Lawson wants us to carry on means that in a few years it should all take care of itself because we won't have cheap oil anymore, and also other fossil fuels, will, more than likely, be way too expensive for most uses. Thus the CO2 emissions should be drastically reduced when we all have to go back to walking and cycling and transportation will be again by horse and cart.
We have by now gone past “Peak Oil” and we will soon be entering the age of the end of cheap oil and thus burning oil in cars, truck and power stations will be history, thankfully.
We must, aside from preparing for that, and my book “The End of Oil” points out some ways, get rid of idiotic politicians and peers who have no idea as to what they are talking about.
The British Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security (ITPOES) which is headed, amongst others by Virgin boss Richard Branson, is scared enough about the impact of the end of cheap oil, which they place at around 2013 that they are urging government to act on that field.
© 2010
