biffvernon wrote:
So we must not consider anything aspirational?
I think unless we aim for a negative value carbon Britain and the rest of the world, catastrophic global warming in inevitable.
It may be difficult but the alternative is doom.
Aspirational is essential, as I guess all here would agree, but this report fails that test badly.
Its very title is hype, as is seen as soon as it's opened and the actual title "Net zero carbon Britain" is read,
and people are ultra-sensitive to and distrustful of hype.
Moreover it shows no interest in promoting the essential sense of common purpose -
on the contrary it shields the urban green interests in the 'preservation' of forest and of deforested heavily acidified moorlands
- which are by far the country's largest Carbon Recovery resource - from any intervention,
while hammering the rural farming culture to the point where the majority would end up trying to scrape a living from a margin
between what agri-contracters charge and what the food and energy corporation contracts will pay.
This outlook is merely pretending that the urban /rural divide can be amplified and dominated by ignorant urban interests.
Which ain't going to happen.
The focus on vegetarianism seems equally ill-considered.
Are they proposing a totalitarian govt that commands farmers what to produce ?
If farmers were crushed out of using the pastureland for livestock, would that govt then restrict imported meat supplies
(after leaving the WTO) or would it merely offshore the production for UK consumers?
OTOH, it could just ration peoples' meat purchases (until it was slung out of office), with most British meat then being exported
to booming markets abroad.
It is a damn shame that CAT have not done better, given that they could have learned something
from the total lack of traction gained by the report's previous version.
I guess that they won't provide anything really useful until they recognize that the priority
is not Little Britain getting to 'Zero' Carbon by some arbitrary date,
it is about shaping societal reform away from GHG dependence
- in a manner that maximizes the sense of common purpose within Britain and so maximizes the pace of change,
- and in a manner that maximizes our seminal influence on the early negotiation of a commensurate global climate treaty.
Getting their heads around the gravity of our climate predicament,
- that even the earliest global end to GHG emissions is not remotely sufficient to avoid intensifying global crop failures
and the geo-political destabilization now looming for the 2020s,
followed by many decades of continued warming pushing the feedbacks beyond the possibility of control -
would be the starting point for CAT to develop useful contributions to commensurate strategy for climate stabilization.
In the absence of such strategy I think we would be, as you say, doomed.
Regards,
Lewis
!
ROF The vision of you making do as a hunter gatherer just brings so many amusing things to mind. Careful what you wish for.