I blame Bono for the Copenhagen failure

Peter From Maidstone

I don't think the science is that hard to understand. I am reading Chill at the moment. A science based book by a committed envionmentalist and scientist which disputes man made global warming and identifies areas where a politically inspired consensus is presented by the IPCC which doesn't exist.

The problem is that the science is being allowed to come out, just a highly modified summary that suits a particular and political agenda.

We are being lied to. Why is the Spectator not doing proper journalism around this issue - or so many others. You only have to ask 'qui bono?'.

BigAl

I notice that Macavity has disappeared from the scene after making such a big deal of arriving early at the summit to save mankind. I guess there are not many votes to be had after such a big failure.

saltirethinking

He's always been one vowel short of being a dog biscuit.

Verity

I blame every moron who believes in "climate change" other than what has has been going on for millions of years. What spittle-flecked little egoists these puny people are to believe that mankind can alter the vastness of the solar system. If they really believe it.

The motivator is the furthering of One Worlders and the agenda of control of populations. I don't believe that anyone except rock stars and possibly David Cameron is stupid enough to believe these idiocies.

John Levett

Daniel, "the anti-democratic, anti-capitalist lunatics who tried to storm the Bella Center" were the descendants of the misguided greenies who set this whole farce in motion. Rightfully, the conference should have been theirs (and we could have ignored it) but the politicians, the mega-corps and the bent scientists pretended to take up the convenient flag of environmentalism in order to fill their pockets at the expense of the developed world's taxpayers and the developing world's poor.

The con artists who run many of the 'developing' nations weren't prepared to accept the piddling billions on offer and delayed the proceedings long enough for China and South Africa to understand that the best interests of their countries would not be best served by climate colonialism.

Bono is an opportunistic irrelevance. Copenhagen failed because it was a massive fraud at every level and Johnny Foreigner recognised it as such, unlike most of the British media and its effete, metropolitan contributers.

Edward Palmer

Science & politics are shown, once again, to be incompatible. COP15 was not about climate science - as you say, it's too complicated for lay understanding. But unfortunately the growing level of doubt about the interpretation of climatic data has fuelled deep scepticism, coupled with the suspicion that some of the datasets used are unreliable. Thankfully Jonah's hope of electoral advantage from his "world statesman" act have now evaporated, so there is a better window for reasoned discussion of these issues again.

Jeremy

I think one of the most serious problems facing democratic societies in the West is that of "Issue-based campaigning" itself.

Single-issue campaigns seem to act as a lightning-rod for the simple-minded (who crave certainty) and for the kind of fanatics who are utterly convinced of the absolute truth of their "cause", whatever the real evidence for it may or may not be. The AGW bandwagon is actually a very good example of the menace posed to our societies, our politics and our liberties by "single-issue" campaigns which can garner enough of the aforementioned type of support to demonize those who deign to disagree with them, shout down their voices and force the hands of our politicians into taking the kind of action which has no firm evidential basis and the consequences of which may be neither good nor right.

Single-issue campaigns tend to both over-simplify and exaggerate the importance of their "issue". They can pervert the balance of our politics, create division and do tremendous harm to the process of rational and sceptical debate upon which we ought to be engaged.

salieri

Not 'blamed', old chap: congratulated.

Publius

@Peter from Maidstone
It's "cui bono" not "qui"

Michael Booth

I blame Bono for the Crusades, the Black Death, The Thirty Years War, Slavery and Children in Need. Why? Because he's there...

RichieP

@Peter From Maidstone
'qui bono?'

Bravo!

AndyinBrum

surely its all Ian Bell's fault?

Nqomi Muse

Peter from Maidstone - Agree.

The basic science is not difficult to understand but how much mankind is involved in creating anything to do with something as big as changes in climate is debatable.

The politicians clutch at something on which they can hang new taxes, or create the new bubble to give the impression that they are passionate all-round good eggs and doing good for all.

The poor and needy in the UK are here and still needy with cuts in the offing and no resolution.

The need for a rounded and holistic view is greater than ever.

Single issue campaigns should only occur in the short term and it be automatic that the single issue is looked at objectively and in perspective of the whole, otherwise they will be tangents that pull other judgements out of balance.

Sadly the politicians are whited sepulchres with feet of clay, as we know only too well from the expenses debacle, and therefore it is up to the common man and the media to pull these things together and look at the whole as well as the specific and single issue, so that the context cannot be ignored.

Snowman

the idiocy is far from dead, the politicians have taken over, and won’t let go what with the unlimited scope for new taxes and kicking us around.

I’d like to start a campaign for limiting the rise in temperature to 1.75degC (or possibly 1.80degC provided that those going for 2degC fund me) as a compromise between the two targets already suggested, and have already began searching for the knob to turn. If anyone happens to stumble on it, please let me know.

Liz Brown

According to Selina Scot on the AM show today - " a country the size of Belgium is going to disappear into the sea i the next 12 months" This posed some questions -
1) what on earth has she been taking? It cannot be legal.
2) which country does she have in mind?
3) Have they been warned?
If that is the sort of guff she believes, thank goodness she no longer reads the news

Noa Zrk

Bono and his contemporary, Bob Geldorf are New Labour throwbacks and no independent thinker would be persuaded of the justice of a cause because of their support to it.
Both have done very well from affiliating themselves to causes. Whilst Geldorf can at least be credited with sincerity and having made a tangible contribution in generating relief funding, Bono's credentials are more open to question. This fat, pompous,tax dodger has managed to extend a career on the basis of a hypocritical sanctimoniousness normally found only in our politicians.
As to Copenhagen, we should take only cautious comfort from its failure to achieve 'agreement'. As Christopher Booker points out in today's Telegraph the iniquitous carbon tax remains.

Gary Williams

Daniel,

"Because the greatest “culprits” - the US and Chinese governments - are not subject to the same kind of pressure European governments are. In the US, the majority of the population does not believe that climate change is man-made..."

That would be in sharp contrast to the 48% of Britons who do not believe in AGW? Not a big difference.
Especially not a big difference when you consider the influences on the respective citizens' opinions. At least in Briton, the primary source of citizens' AGW fears has been the Government itself - Stern Report, a Climate Change "Minister", Gordon "You-must-be-a-flat-earther" Brown.
Come on - do you really think the Government has not had its own heavy hand in shaping public opinion? Goodness knows it's trying hard enough to shape it.

JohnBUK

@Edward Palmer, "it's too difficult for the lay to understand..." and it's too difficult for the science community to understand. Snowman is right, personally I'd elect to push the tide back another 15.63 millimeters - that should solve the "drowning nations" problems overnight.

Sam ARMSTRONG

Bono is merely a puppet whose strings are being pulled by the New World Order.

Sam ARMSTRONG

Bono's job is to use his crap music to spread the word to the fashion-conscious, to make Global Warming and Famine look cool. Nazi tactics really.

AndyinBrum

Noa Zark "Bono's credentials are more open to question. This fat, pompous,tax dodger has managed to extend a career on the basis of a hypocritical sanctimoniousness normally found only in our politicians."

Oh come on, thats a bit harsh

to Politicians

Yow Min Lye

Bono - someone else with a carbon footprint the size of Burkino Faso.

Ira Straus

You're right, it's a problem that's been growing for some time. Getting cooperation between countries is hard enough, without mobs of screwballs screwing it up.

Herewith a similar comment I worked up a few days ago.

I'd be glad to pursue this matter with you. It's a real problem for the world and shouldn't be left for me and thee to notice it alone.

Ira

Who killed Copenhagen?
The Environmental Movement did it, by focusing on punishing the West

By Ira Straus

The blame game has begun as to 'Who Killed Copenhagen'. China blames America; America blames China. Third World loudly blames First; First World in rather subdued tones blames Third.

But a better answer to the question would be: the Environmentalist Movement. It preyed on the normal difference of interest between First and Third Worlds, turning it into an ideological matter.

There was tremendous mobilization by the Movement, on the streets of Copenhagen and, through NGOs, inside the negotiating hall. And not just at Copenhagen but in the months and years before. It encouraged the Third World to go irreconcilable against the First. It set up the predominant international discussion and proposals on terms that made agreement impossible. This was the reason why the negotiations were seen as on the verge of collapse long before Copenhagen formally convened.

The environmentalist groups subordinated the goal of cutting emissions to an extraneous goal: cutting down the West. In practice, this meant anti-emissionsism was not just subordinated to anti-Westernism but sacrificed to it. This anti-Westernism, in a word, is what killed Copenhagen.

The protesters out in the streets tried storming the meeting, fighting the police, obstructing the movements of government delegates. But what did they and their organizers -- groups like “EcoJustice” -- want? Formally, they called for a stronger emissions agreement. The media ought not to pass on such claims without rudimentary use of its investigative skills. One need only read their literature, or listen carefully to their language on TV, to see that their main goal was not emissions but “justice”. By this they meant, not justice for all, but justice against the West and against “corporations” -- reparations by the West for its supposed guilt before the Third World, and massive wealth transfers.

The same anti-Western line was taken by the NGOs who provided the spokespersons on TV for environmentalism. They invariably deflected onto the West the blame for the obstructions in the negotiations. This meant the Third World countries, who already emit much more the West and are rapidly widening the gap, were let off the hook. Thanks to the din of the Movement, the worst emitters were insulated from the honest, realistic pressures that, in an ordinary closed-door NGO-free negotiation, might have brought them to a decent compromise.

The numbers are well enough known. The Third World produces 50% of global emissions, the West 39%. Over 90% of the growth in emissions is estimated to come from the Third World. Third World production is far more emissively wasteful than Western; it has 3.9 times the “emissions intensity”, as it is called.

In these conditions, deflecting all the pressure onto the West means preventing any movement toward real emissions reductions.

A Financial Times correspondent, Fiona Harvey, concluded that it was Western NGOs that organized the Third World protests inside the negotiating hall. Their destructive interference began from the opening moments at Copenhagen, when the conference was derailed by a Third World walkout in “protest” of the “Danish text”. This protest, a scandal in diplomatic protocol and one that lost the negotiations more than a day, used using the telltale tactics and demonizing language of the Western street protesters and NGOs. It was “an NGO-created storm that will not benefit poor countries” (http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/2009/12/09/a-draft-text-from-denmark-or-an-ngo-generated-storm-that-will-not-benefit-poor-countries/) The “Danish “text”, it turns out, was the normal work a host government does, consulting all the major parties and trying to put together a viable basis for agreement. Its demonization from the start of the meeting made a positive outcome unlikely.

More such protests ensued every few days. The result was not only to waste much of the limited time available but to consistently deflect the substance of the negotiations, making it impossible to reach any agreement that would reduce emissions globally. This in turn meant that any agreement that might be reached, because it would not reduce emissions globally, would either (a) be meaningless, not requiring anyone to do much more than they were going to do anyway, or (b) not be ratifiable in some of the countries, including the U.S., that would be asked to make major sacrifices while global emissions would go up anyway.

It was the same way Kyoto was turned into a failure. Meaning that Kyoto could not stop or even slow global emissions growth, since it placed no obligations on China, India, the OPEC countries, and the rest of the Third World where emissions really could be slowed or cut substantially but instead have been booming. And this caused the U.S. Senate almost unanimously to reject Kyoto, during the administration of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

It all has had the same spirit as a purported “Asian People’s Climate Court” in Thailand in October this year. There the West was found “guilty” and punished with fines totaling trillions of dollars. It turns out Western NGOs organized the event, and got Third Worlders to front for it. The chief organizer was “Tcktcktck”, formed in April 2009 with the self-described goal of influencing the Copenhagen negotiations. It is a First World NGO coalition, with some of the best known NGOs behind it -- Oxfam, Greenpeace, Christian Aid, World Council of Churches, World Wildlife Fund, Avaaz, Global Humanitarian Forum, Global Call to Action against Poverty -- and with a Quebec government subsidy of $300,000. The “judge” was Chair of the Thai Human Rights Commission; the “Chief-Prosecutor” was an environmental lawyer. It’s all too easy for Western NGOs to enlist such people, using them as front men. It gives the illusion of an honest Third World grievance, when it is actually just an intra-Western feud, a vendetta against the West by ideological groups inside the West.

The mainstream of the real existing Third World does not hate the West the way Western NGOs do. While Western ideologues construct an alternative history in which the West has impoverished the Third World, the bulk of the Third World understands that it has gained tremendously from its interactions with the West, despite all its resentments over weaker and more backward situation. Of course it has a natural interest in always getting a still better deal, such as a gift of trillions of dollars. And it knows the victim language is useful as a bargaining tool. This creates an opening for the NGOs; they can sometimes get Third World governments to take stances that block an agreement. The protesters in the streets meanwhile try to block the proceedings. The Third World pays the price for the negotiating failure.

The same thing happened a decade ago in the “battle of Seattle” in 1999. That the event that provided the template for extremist disruption of inter-governmental gatherings, something that has since become almost routine. The Seattle street warfare fatally disrupted world trade talks. It was a result the protest organizations were openly proud of; on that occasion, they spoke of no accessory goal like emissions reduction, only enmity toward “world capitalism” and the West.

The Third World was the main victim of the lack of a trade agreement. This did not stop the protesters from speaking in the name of the Third World. It was a matter of an ideology so powerfully entrenched in their minds as to blind them to the obvious realities.

Their ideology derived from the Third Worldism of the 1960s New Left. The New Left kept the anti-Western identity from the Old Left, but shifted its external attachment from the Soviet Union to the Third World. It was Third Worldist, not in a sense of wanting to understand and help the actual Third World, but in the sense of finding a fantasy image to identify with and set up as a moral authority -- a surrogate father figure -- in place of the West. The “Third World” of the Movement is an ideological construct unrestrained by facts; it is a place of nature, natural religiosity, natural sex, natural environment, feminism (India, with its suttee and oppression of women, is especially often described as feminist), free of modern industrial capitalism, almost pristine pure -- tainted only due to exploitation by the West.

This narrative even today retains its psychological force. The postulate of Third World innocence and Western guilt provides the structure of thought and moral orientation for the entire Movement, both in its “Justice” and its “Environment” wings -- and both on the streets and inside the negotiating hall. It is the ur-narrative that stands behind all the specific mental constructs and policy choices, which on the surface might seem weird.

This ur-narrative leads the Movement to deflect the pressure on emissions always onto the West, always away from the actual Third World source of emissions growth. Perverse though this is from the standpoint of the actual environment, it is strictly logical for a Movement whose basic postulate is Third Worldist and anti-Western. It is what has pre-programmed the Environmental wing of the Movement to confound and, thus far, successfully defeat the cause of emissions reductions.

Emissions reductions will succeed only if pressures are redirected toward the actual danger.

Could this be done by the media separating itself psychologically from the Movement and taking an independent stance that is genuinely anti-emissions not anti-Western? Perhaps. But this might be as hard as giving up a personal identity, or religion.

A more likely way for it to be done is the way advocated by Sarkozy and Merkel, and by the U.S. House’s emissions bill: to tax not only our domestic emissions, directly or indirectly, but also to tax emissions-inputs into imported goods at a similar rate, through an environmental tariff.

This is the practical way out of the impasse into which the Movement has driven the emissions issue. It would create a powerful, direct incentive for emissions reductions everywhere. This would be genuine justice for all on emissions, not the false kind in which the word “justice” is equated with anything anti-Western.

It would also keep the taxation playing field level. Without the tariff, the domestic emissions tax would create what economists abhor as “trade diversion” -- a kind of reverse protectionism, in which natural trade is replaced by tax-evading trade, efficiency is reduced, and emissions are not cut but outsourced.

Finally, it would produce a balance of bargaining pressures that reflects reality. It is the one thing could lead, in the post-Copenhagen rounds of negotiations, to a meaningful global agreement.

The writer, Ira Straus, is an independent analyst of international affairs. He is also executive director of Democracy International and chair of the World Democracy Movement. He is pro-environment, pro-West, and pro-Third World, and opposes ideologies that assume the West is the enemy of the earth and the Third World. irastraus@aol.com, 703-536-7082, in Arlington, VA.

porkbelly

What ever happened to proper rock stars who pitched televisions out of hotel windows and crashed Lamborghinis at 4am? Surely Gaia is signaling her deep distress when these lovable, furry creatures begin displaying such disturbingly-altered behavior? Let us cease worrying about CO2 levels and start doing something about the diminishing availability of cocaine and Jack Daniels in their habitat. A global conference in Las Vegas would be a good way to start.

Jim McCubbin

BONO ... YOKO ONO -o-o-
Is it shorthand for just wearing glasses?

Finzi Holst

Daniel writes rather Leftly: "So who or what is to blame for the failure of the Copenhagen gathering to achieve what most people hoped for?"

My dear fellow, most people did not hope for anything to come out of Copenhagen -- certainly not thinking people at any rate.

Man-made Global Warming is a Scam wrapped in Corruption and served in a reduction of Truth.

You are it appears a mamber of the chorus of castrati lemmings the Left so like to exploit.

Rather than blame the US and China (typical to blame others) why not simply say you are saddened that the facts are getting out and that you are disappointed the lie of Man Made Global Warming is being exposed.

You are free to believe your religion, but do not try to foist it off on others. We are tired of it.

Amadeus Plonquer

We should all listen to what Mister Bozo has to say. After all he is the greatest entertainer in the history of TV.

In these days where there is a distinct lack of global role models Bozo stands apart. We only have to look at all the good work he does for his bankrupt home country, Ireland. Bozo is indeed a TRUE Irishman who would do anything for his country... (except of course live there. And pay taxes.)

C'mon Bozo, give us a tune.

Fergus Pickering

'A country the size of Belgium'? Perhaps it IS Belgium. That would solve quite a lot of problems, wouldn't it? Let's hope it happens very suddenly while the European Parliament is in session.

Archie

Why anyone in their right mind would listen to word this preposterous nincompoop says is completely beyond me! Oh, and Publius, I think that "Qui" Bono is the joke?

salieri

Finzi Holst:

Or may I call you Gerald Gustav? How wonderful to have 2 more rational composers on board. Welcome to our little band.

Sorry, no time for more, must get Bach to my Chopin Liszt.

Verity

Daniel Korski blames Bono. I blame the lunacy of the concept that mankind can influence sun spots on the sun.

But let us remember that behind this loony, pretend agenda is a far more sinister force, and that is the One Worlders. The panic button of "global warming" is but one string in their bow.

jimmy the gun o hara

well in my opinion this overinflated court jester should but out and keep his illeducated opinions to himself and stick to what he knows best ,absolutely nothing!

ab

If people want a green world.
then stop buying Chineese products.

China frustrated the COP top,
now people of the world decide themselves.

No more "made by china" unless approved by a green label.
We make china transparent! That should be done anyway.
Digital democracy of the third millennium: how can you expect your
government to take responsibility if you do not even bother about a green
label ?

You don't have to wait tille the next top, start yourselves, start today, start small! If governments want to join, they shloud implement green labels. Imagine a green label, next to "made by china" hi hi

Silvia from Italy

2500 millions human beings living in poverty; 1100 millions without drinkable water; 1000 millions starving: what's got Bono do with that?
You just need some expotion, do you?
Now, you've been clicked, happy?