Climate change

Honesty is an attractive though rare quality in a politician, and Alistair Darling’s self-awareness and morose delivery always grabs attention. Last night, the former chancellor told a conference of bankers that the 50 percent levy on bonuses over £25,000 was a failure. The FT reports him saying: ‘I think it will be a one-off thing because, frankly, the very people you are after here are very good at getting out of these things and . . . will find all sorts of imaginative ways of avoiding it in the future… what I wanted to do was send a message to them that we all live in the same world together.’

The debate over climate change is one of the most polarised in UK politics, between those advocating doing everything possible (no matter what the cost) and those who refuse to think about doing anything at all. If, like us, you take the view that the science tells us there are major risks from climate change – albeit with uncertainty around how bad, when and where the risks might bear out – but that costs matter, you are likely to find yourself simultaneously denounced by both sides as a ‘denialist’ and a ‘warmist’. Our new report, Greener, Cheaper explores how we can cut the costs of cutting carbon. We assume that

Perhaps the most sinister side of the environmentalist movement is the idea of an “optimal population,” where human life is seen as a menace. The Optimal Population Trust has today said that there are 45 million too many people living in Britain – which, for a country of 60 million, is quite some statement. The peculiar thing is that this “problem” may well have a solution in the form of the human race failing to reproduce. The hands of the world population clock are slowing. The natural population replacement level, 2.1 kids per woman, is achieved by no European country (pdf here). England stands at a respectable 1.75, Scotland at

The President of the Maldives can sell his snorkel: he’ll be waving not drowning. The New Scientist carries a fascinating article, examining the research of Paul Kench of the University of Auckland and Arthur Webb of the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission. Using aerial photographs and high-resolution satellite images, Kench and Webb have found that 23 out of 27 low-lying Pacific islands, deemed to be vulnerable to rising sea levels, have grown by up to 10 percent in 40 years. Local sea levels have risen by 120 millimetres over the period. Coral is defying the apocalyptic flooding scenarios. Reef coral surrounding the islands is eroded and deposited to form atolls

Several months ago, European leaders went to Copenhagen to save the planet. China, India and Brazil on the other hand went to the climate negotiations in Denmark to showcase the changed distribution of power in the world. Unsurprisingly, the Europeans came home empty-handed, shut out of the key negotiations and powerless despite what was meant to be a standard-setting promise of 20 percent cut in the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions. The US and the rising powers struck a non-binding deal, the value of which is still being determined. Reading today’s cover story in The Times, the lesson the eco-friendly EU Commission seems to have drawn from this experience is that

I have been gripped by The Guardian’s climate change investigation and reporting these last few days. We do like to tease George Monbiot but he was one of the first to denounce spinning of the data and science by the University of East Anglia’s climate unit. It’s a mark of his professionalism and seriousness: global warming is a cause important to him, and he resents attempts to misrepresent things by his own side, or by his enemies. The Guardian seems to take the same view, and has sent David Leigh and others out on the investigation trail, and the final in the four-part series is printed today. It shows how

So who or what is to blame for the failure of the Copenhagen gathering to achieve what most people hoped for? Polly Toynbee says that the nature of politics is to blame. Personally I blame U2’s Bono. I don’t blame him for the failure of world leaders to agree a legally-binding agreement, of course. But I do blame him for the unrealistic expectations that were raised in the run-up to the meeting. Issue-based campaigning, of which the climate change movement is the latest example, came into its own with the debt-relief campaign of Jubilee 2000, which the Irish singer spearheaded. Since then, every global issue has been approached in much

This morning’s papers share a unifying theme: the failure of political leadership to secure a deal at Copenhagen. Now, I applaud politicians for not succombing to enormous pressure and making a series of pledges that would risk grinding the world’s poor ever deeper into the dirt. For those who take a different view, it is not that politicians have failed, but that high politics is an irrelevance, a vanity. I know Coffee Housers loathe her opinions, but Polly Toynbee is at her polemical best today. She writes: ‘Politics is being weighed in the balance and found wanting. The writing is on the wall. The leadership required within and between each

Today the TaxPayers’ Alliance is releasing a new report which sets out the huge and excessive burden that green taxes impose on families and business across the UK. At the moment, 14 percent of domestic bill costs are the result of climate change policies.  Increasing the price of energy hits the poor and elderly hardest – which, in turn, increases poverty and benefit dependency.  At the same time, 21 percent of industrial electricity bills are the result of climate change policies.  If we want to make our economy less dependent on financial services, driving up a major part of many manufacturing firms’ costs isn’t the way to do it. Despite

The Spectator’s Global Warming special is only in the shops for a couple more days.  If you’ve missed it – or if you still need convincing to buy it – here’s an extended version of the article by Amanda Baillieu from within its pages: When a work colleague sent a tweet to his 2000 followers comparing me to Nick Griffin I realised I was heading for my Jan Moir moment. A few days before, I had written an opinion piece with the rather attention seeking headline Is global warming hot air?  I’d wanted to see if my readers, who are mainly architects, agreed with the line now adopted by the