The environmental lobby should be the happiest people in Britain right now. The more people laid off, and the poorer people become, the greener this country will get. All that nasty consumption, and economic growth: kaboom! No more. Those Indians and East Asians who looked dangerously like they were about to upgrade from mud huts for houses, and to start to polluting by consuming – well, they’ll be doing that a lot more slowly now. And the great unwashed British masses, who looked like they needed to be taxed out of the sky and off the roads – well, the recession will also take care of them. And the UK economy contracting by between 2% and 5% this year will do wonders for reducing our CO2 emmissions.
See, the recession changes everything: the present, the past and the future. The projected CO2 levels that looked so scary depended on a fairly heroic assumption of growth in both GDP and consumption.
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