Leader: Less heat, more light

We have heard surprisingly little about the climate change jamboree currently underway in Cancun. Before last year’s Copenhagen summit, there was much hullaballoo. Gordon Brown told us that we had ‘fewer than 50 days to set the course of the next 50 years’. Yet he and 100 of his political counterparts could not stop the conference from collapsing under the weight of its contradictions. This year, only two dozen world leaders are likely to make the carbon-consuming trek to the Mexican coast. David Cameron, to his credit, will not be one of them.

He will not miss much. One paper prepared for the Cancun summit, by Prof Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, proposes halting economic growth in the developed world for the next 20 years. It continues, ‘The second world war and the concept of rationing is something we need to seriously consider.’ Such ideas place the Cancun summit only a few intellectual notches above a Star Trek convention.

Yet again, the conference seems to be a stage on which scientific inquiry is displaced by propaganda. And the tragedy is that there is much to be discussed. The global warming orthodoxy — to which every main British political party subscribes — rests on four pillars of received wisdom. Climate change is happening; it is driven by human activity; global catastrophe is imminent; and radical, government-directed carbon reduction is the only answer. For climate zealots, one either believes all four propositions or one is a ‘denier’.

If reasonable debate were allowed, several important issues would present themselves. What, for instance, is the cost to our manufacturing sector of the carbon emission targets? Green taxes will slow Britain’s economic recovery. But by how much, and what, precisely, would we achieve in agreeing to forsake greater prosperity? How might technological developments help us cope with global warming? And are there cheaper, more efficient ways of preparing for climate change?

Some estimate that painting roofs a reflective white on Los Angeles properties would slow the rate of global warming in the city by 90 years.