The Leader

NOTHING IS 'SUSTAINABLE'

31 August 2002

As the week progresses, it is certain that the subject of free trade will be drowned out by yet more waffle on global warming; a phenomenon which remains far from proven. Measurements of global temperatures taken in the mid troposphere show little or no change over the past 30 years. Even if one chooses to take notice only of measurements from the Earth's surface - which do indicate a modest warming of 0.3 to 0.6 Celsius over the past century - it is far from obvious that global warming will prove to be anything like the problem which the environmental lobby likes to present: sea levels in the Indian Ocean have actually fallen since the 1980s, when the lobby warned that several island nations were about to be swamped.

As the renegade environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg points out in the New York Times this week, for the cost of implementing the Kyoto protocol for just one year, the West could provide everyone in the world with a clean water supply. That our priorities have become so twisted is largely the fault of the environmental lobby. The religion of 'sustainability' is furthering the careers of many self-serving environmentalists, but it is impoverishing further the world's poor.