Carbon dictatorship warning if world fails to act
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By Daniel Nelson
If the world fails to tackle climate change, a carbon dictatorship might take over - backed by military force - to control emissions. That was how Professor John Keane of Westminster Universitys Centre for Study of Democracy characterised the views of Australian crusader Tim Flannery during a discussion in London this week. Unless action was taken, Flannery foresaw the darkest of dark ages, leading to the establishment of an Earth Commission for Thermostatic Control, he said. But Keane dismissed Flannerys political suggestions as woolly: reduce your carbon footprint, use your vote, act swiftly and delegate power upwards to help combat the threat of global warming. The two other speakers at the meeting on We, the Weather Makers - a discussion of the implications of climate change science for political economy and democracy, were less convinced of the need for drastic action. Its a big but manageable problem, was the middle-of-the-road assessment by Dr Neil Strachan, senior research fellow with the Policy Studies Institutes Environment Group. It will cost us a lot but we can afford it. Strachan pointed out that estimates of the cost to Britain of 1-2 per cent of its gross domestic product (£30- £60 billion) was the equivalent of staging six Olympics or renewing the Trident nuclear missile system. Because uncertainty surrounded the subject, he favoured sequential decision-making to avoid massive expenditure that might turn out to be unnecessary. The risk of this approach, he admitted, was that irreversible climate change might occur. Professor David Henderson, visiting professor at the Westminster business school and former chief economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (the grouping of industrialised countries) was more critical of the climate crusaders not surprising, given that he recently published a critique of corporate social responsibility, Misguided Virtue. Describing himself as dissenter from the recent Stern report on the economics of climate change, which he said failed to take account of uncertainties and lack of knowledge, overstated the probable cost of climate change, underestimated the cost of ambitious mitigation policies and tilted to unwarranted alarmism. He also criticised governments reliance on the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, which he described as not up to the mark, professionally. They have an endemic bias to alarmism, he claimed, making it clear he meant the people who run the show, not the 2,500 scientists who contributed to the work of the Panel. He called for an independent review of the Panels latest report. * For information about Tim Flannery's book |
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