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.