Paying for a climate change deal

salieri

The man is patently unhinged.

Nicholas

The fat owl is a menace, his actions those of a dictator. Where does parliamentary democracy and sovereignty factor into this cosy little deal of EU "leaders" deciding what is good for us? Sarkozy and Brown? A grotesque double act from the trite school of "keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer", an un-funny Morecombe and Wise for the glitzy, self-important and utterly useless EU roadshow.

There is also something unpleasantly ridiculous about Brown galavanting about trumpeting loudly as the time for his exit from British politics draws ever closer.

Is this the longest period between elections? It feels like it. Could someone with the statistical data on the length of parliaments please comment?

John Adlington

"Hello Darling! Did you get what I asked you, the wind turbine, the photovoltaic cells, the wave power generator?"

"Even better than that dear! I got half a dozen kalashnikovs, a box of grenades, some machetes and an armoured personnel carrier"

Number7

Why can't he go and save another planet - preferably on the other side of the Universe.

Sally Chatterjee

So what would you do David?

Yes the tax looks unworkable. I can't imagine the US will sign up to a tax that sees monies flowing abroad to places like Ethiopia.

After all, I enjoy a cup of good coffee and when people buy Ethiopean coffee there is rarely a way to know where the coffee came from, it passes through middlemen and even warlords along the way before it reaches the market. If this happens to a cup of Yirgacheffe, then imagine how many times a payment to Ethiopia to encourage clean energy will get sliced?

Brown is always happy strutting the world stage, fixing behind-the-scenes details like some dogsbody accountant. I wish he'd stay in Copenhagen.

Publius

"aid packages... must be free from administrative venality"

-- Oh, I know, let's ask the UN to administer it.

Dave B

I'm half expecting to see headlines that MI5 have assassinated Mr Brown, because of the threat he posed to the security of the Realm.

Kevyn Bodman

More tax.
That's an important part of their agenda.
Don't forget it,they like more tax.

Kevyn Bodman

Why will an enormous fund be needed?
Where will the money come from?
Who will administer it?

Three simple,yet possibly difficult,questions for fund-fans to answer.

Get these adminstrators out of the way and let individuals and businesses find the solution.

Olaf

And how do we pay for this when the country is skint?

Hmm is there an insanity clause in international law? So we can cancel everything Gorgon signed by saying he was a window licker?

John Moss

Most of the "solutions" proposed for climate change are internationalist, collectivist, anti-business, anti-personal choice, high-tax, regulation-driven and reactionary. Don't drive, don't eat meat, don't fly, grow food yourself, or buy food grown locally not by some big agri-business - or even a subsistance farmer in Africa.

The whole "green" movement appears to be a resurgence of communist/marxist/socialist ideology, just in new, less frightening clothes, designed to persuade/cajole/force us to live our lives by the rules drawn up by "experts" and "planners" working along with a self-declared "consensus".

Where's Hayek when you need him?

Dorothy Wilson

Olaf: Is there an insanity clause anywhere that will rid the UK of this made mullah? The Conservatives have their "men in grey suits". Do NuLabour have any "men in white suits".

On the subject of climate change, if there is any truth in the agenda that is being pushed in Copenhagan, one of the key ways to do something about is to limit the population growth. In the 1970s the UN had a planned parenthood programme, which presumably fell foul of the growth in political correctness. It needs to be relaunched.

And I've never been able to work out how NuLabour squares the circle of the commitment to the climate change agenda, which spins in one direction, with the equally strong commitment to unfettered immigration, which pulls in the other.

Tom Pride

Dorothy
December 16th, 2009 10:27am

Votes.

Fergus Pickering

Do you know, I could have sworn somebody aid that MI5 had assassinated Mr Brown. It's getting to feel a lot like Christmas.

Man in a Shed

Does anybody know of an international negotiation where Brown has even done well for the UK ?

He just hands our money out in exchange for getting a few lines of news print.

In2minds

How to pay for a climate change deal? What about a tax on Tony Blair's lies at the Chilcot Inquiry?

John Levett

So - the Ethiopians have a plan to assist poor nations to adapt to a carbon neutral global economy that is based on handouts of £100bn p.a. from western taxpayers.

The easiest, and cheapest, course of action is to accept that a 'carbon neutral' global economy is a political subterfuge. Carbon neutral implies offsets rather than reductions: as the whole phoney science is predicated on CO2 reduction to save the world, a 'carbon neutral global economy' has no justification and should be abandoned. Once abandoned there is no need for poor countries (or rich ones for that matter)to adapt.

Secondly, what are countries like Ethiopia going to be adapting to? I was under the impression that despite decades of western aid, the average Ethiopian struggles to consume sufficient food and water, let alone fossil fuels.

A quick check on Bing suggests that in 2003, Ethiopia had debts of $6.8bn. What is that figure now? If we really cared about poor countries, shouldn't we have written off their debts and given them one last opportunity to help themselves?

This so-called plan is nothing more than a wheeze to restrict aid to only those countries prepared to stop competing with the west for fossil fuel resources.

Watt Tyler

What is David Cameron going to do about the fact that the AGW theory relies on thoroughly discredited science?

Nothing.

“Faced by a mini-revolt from climate change sceptics within his own party, he said: “A very small number of people take a different view on the science, but the policy is driven by me, and that is the way it is going to be.”

This from the Guardian.

Because this is what the Tories are about. They get their foot soldiers on places like the Spectator to talk about the differences between the two parties - issues like finances are safe ground in that respect. If climate change is mentioned, then we steer well clear of the Tories real views.

In the Guardian, Cameron and his All New Conservatives with added LibDem-iness are telling the punters that the differences between the main three parties are negligable.

He is doing this in plain sight, and yet Conservatives think that they can trust him.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100020050/climategate-why-david-cameron-is-going-to-be-a-disastrous-for-britain/comment-page-1/#comment-100107337

He is about "power" first and country second, but he banking on the core Tory vote to be a bunch of willing idiots, and relying on a prejudice against UKIP because they don't present as well. And you are going to take it.

Marcher Baron

"If we really cared about poor countries, shouldn't we have written off their debts and given them one last opportunity to help themselves?" I seem to recall Brown writing off billions of pounds of third world debt a few years ago, John. In the meantime, Brown gives away £1.5 bn, but that's not enough, so he's just handed out another £1.2 bn of money he'll have to borrow (or print) to reduce deforestation. The man really should be restrained for the sake of the country.

Verity

John Adlington - I like your thinking.

Verity

This is akin to taxing people for the sun coming up in the morning. It is a total con. I don't know why these confidence tricksters - I mean, Al Gore! Gordon Brown! - aren't being regarded as the self-serving leeches they are. Can't remember the rest of their names, out of a committed lack of interest, but look at the company you're keeping.

If the Ethiopians are so poor, why don't they get off their arse and invent something the world wants?

Publius

@Verity
"This is akin to taxing people for the sun coming up in the morning."

-- Superbly put

"If the Ethiopians are so poor, why don't they get off their arse and invent something the world wants?"

-- It looks like they've discovered a far easier way to get rich.

Viv Evans

'the developing world has its responsibilities as much we do.'

Pity they don't know that - after about 50 years of independence.
Why can they not start their own funds for a climate change future?
Might it be that too much of our aid is spent on wars and armaments, the rest going into the Swiss bank accounts of the dictators?

Like the welfare addicts here in this country, the whole developing world looks like a global welfare addict to me.
Can anybody explain why we still support India, a nuclear power, with a space programme?

If people want to help the poor - let them do it out of their own pockets, via charities. This state aid has to stop - especially when we have debts rising to monopoly money levels.

Woody

Gordon Brown is seriously beginning to scare me. This man seems set on a course to completely bankrupt this country both morally and financially, aided and abetted by the left-wing media (i.e. BBC)

I can only hope that Peter Mandelson's disappearing act is because for once he may put this country first and be plotting to put the final nail in Gordon Brown's coffin.

Perhaps they 'know too much' about each other for that to happen!!!

I'm completely despairing about the future of this country, Gordon Brown is selling it down the river but he won't care because I'm sure he has already got his next job lined up - 'Head of the World Order'.

Frank P

Has anyone read the 'draft agreement' for the Copenhagen conference? Apparently it contains some quite horrendous proposals for World Government - apart from demands for undemocratic crippling taxation and undermining of the progress of Western Civilisation.

Alun Reynolds

"If the Ethiopians are so poor, why don't they get off their arse and invent something the world wants?"

They have Verity... ...a salve for unreasonably held feelings of self loathing and guilt.

John Mounsey

Woody: yes, Mandelson does know too much about Gordon and what's more, he's got the negatives! (Allegedly)

logdon

From the Biased BBC blog

Copenhagen Guest Blogger
(This is a guest blog from BBC environment correspondent Richard Blackbin in Copenhagen.)

Why can't more people be just like me?

The question first came to mind on the plane to Copenhagen as I caressed my cheek with my Guardian COP15 84-page pull-out supplement.

If more people were like BBC environment correspondents, I reflected, then the world would be a better place because people like me understand things so much better than ordinary folk.

Gazing out from the window at the frosty city landscape while we circled the airport, another thought struck me: perhaps I should have worn a little more than a Greenpeace T-shirt, Bermuda shorts and Birkenstock sandals.

I asked the stewardess if there was a clothes shop in the terminal building where I could purchase some sturdy boots and a reasonably priced winter coat made from sustainable natural products, but she didn't seem to understand.

"Have you at least heard of Fair Trade in Denmark?" I asked, pointedly.

"Sir, I can't understand a word you're saying when you've got your thumb in your mouth," she replied, rather too harshly for my liking. Maybe she was one of those "conservative women" one sometimes hears about. I was quite shaken, and decided not to press the issue. I would jolly well find a shop myself, I thought.

As things turned out, I didn't have to.

There I was shivering by the baggage carousel waiting for my duffle bag (small size, made from sustainable Romanian hemp) when who should I see but Marmaduke Quimly-Farquharson, one of Oxfam's go-getting young press officers. We have shared many thousands of air miles together travelling the world to exotic locations for various climate conferences. Indeed, we'd both been on the same flight just then but thanks to all this frightful recent scrutiny about BBC expenses I'm no longer able to travel up in first with all my pals from the NGOs.

In one of the many acts of kindness one often experiences at these events (populated as they are by caring planet-loving types and not old right-wing white men with their sceptical views) Marmaduke offered to lend me a coat on condition that I give Oxfam a bit of a mention now and then during my reports. I agreed, of course. "After all, we're in this together!" I said.

"Indeed we are!" he replied. "Why quite can't more people be just like you, Richard?"

My thoughts exactly.

JohnBUK

Logdon - excellent, I'll cancel my TV Licence now if you'll carry on with your blog.

logdon

John Mounsey
December 16th, 2009 4:58pm

Do either of them have any positives?

John Richardson

Watt Tyler 1:43 pm

It's worse than you imagine I'm afraid.
The Conservatives you refer to do not actually think that they can 'trust' Cameron.
Instead, they know he is a traitor a fraud and a mediocraty.
They will support him anyway for reasons both complex and simple but always cowardly.
They are a dead weight.
They should not be politely tolerated.
Like the perverts, liars thieves and bastards at, say, the Labour Party Conference, we should look at these Conservatives and say; your influence means the Party probably does not deserve Office.

It is possible neither Party will win the next election.
Ultimately the least damaging result as change would follow.