British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling has been trumpeting a “34% cut in UK emissions by 2020″ in his budget speech:

Today, I am presenting the world’s first ever carbon budget, which commits Britain to cut carbon emission by 34 per cent by 2020.

These budgets give industry the certainty needed to developed and use low carbon technology – cutting emissions, creating new businesses and jobs.

They are a landmark step, which point the way to the vital decisions which must be made at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit later this year.

But this cut is not quite what it seems. The baseline year isn’t 2009 or 2010, but 1990. UK emissions had already fallen 19.5% below 1990 levels in 2008 and will be falling fast in 2009 due to the recession. So the cut over 2010-2020 will be considerably less than 15%

If there’s a deal at Copenhagen, the UK will almost certainly have to do more. According to the background briefing, the UK aims to help the EU achieve a 20% cut by 2020 (again, against a 1990 benchmark). But Europe has said it will accept a 30% cut if others reciprocate – so the UK’s rather unambitious carbon budget may soon need to be tightened…

Update: The media seem quite happy to propogate the figure without explaining that it doesn’t mean what it seems to mean.

BBC:  Britain commits to cut carbon emissions by 34% by 2020

Guardian: Carbon budget commits UK to reduce emissions by 35% by 2020.

Telegraph: Chancellor presenting the world’s first ever carbon budget, committing Britain to cut carbon emissions by 34pc by 2020.

Times: Commits to cutting carbon emissions by 34% by 2020

Independent: Chancellor, presenting the world’s first carbon budget, committed Britain to cut carbon emissions by 34 per cent by 2020.

I’m honoured to be Mark Steyn’s reader of the day, chosen for pointing out that he “delights in weaving a sick fantasy for his audience”!

Steyn is author of the jaunty and thuggish rant, America Alone, a book that George Bush loved and to which Michael Gove, Shadow Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families, gave a gushing review:

No writer I can think of manages to combine utter bleakness about mankind’s prospects with a genius for one-liners like Steyn… Steyn has done us all a service… ensuring that questions some would prefer to pass over are posed in a way it is impossible to ignore.

So what does Steyn tell his eager audience to expect from its European allies in 2030? A whole lot of trouble. The continent will be in flames, he believes, overrun by ‘darker forces’, with ‘Native Europeans’ beset by a Muslim youth that has fused Western licentiousness with European fanaticism.

Non-Muslims will face three choices: fight, surrender or flee:

Well, my view of Europe in 20 years’ time is that you’ll be switching on the TV, you’ll be looking at scenes of burning and conflagration and riots in the street. You will have a couple of countries that are maybe in civil war, at least on the brink of it.

You will have neofascists’ resurgence in some countries and you’ll have other countries that have just been painlessly euthanized in which a Muslim political class has effectively got its way without a shot being fired — and large numbers of people, particularly young people, have left those countries and have moved on to whoever will take them.

You know, the Dutch are going to Australia, Canada, and New Zealand and some of them, no doubt, would have liked to have gone to the U.S., but the U.S. doesn’t really have a legal immigration program. So, if you need to get out in a hurry, it’s no good going to the U.S. embassy. 

(more…)

The Rt. Hon. The Lord West of Spithead GCB DSC – a junior Home Office minister responsible for counter-terrorism and security – has waded into the debate on policing at the G20. And he’s determined to sound like a berk:

Thousands of officers acted absolutely professionally and proportionately, thousands were actually able to demonstrate peacefully on our streets, criminal activity in the rest of the metropolis was kept to an absolute minimum and the police also maintained high levels of security.

And I think we should be extremely proud of them. This does not excuse acts which are criminal and there are now investigations taking place for those particulars.

But in general I think we are very well-served by our police. I am very proud of them and the way I approach it generally is they are on our side and they are our people…

I have to say I do not like the thought of water cannon, baton rounds or shooting people all of which seem to occur in some other countries and I am jolly glad I live in this country. But all of those things will be looked at.

In contrast, Denis O’Conner, the policeman heading the inquiry into the protest, has branded police tactics ‘unacceptable’…  

(See also, Charlie’s concerns about how the police were hyping up the potential for trouble before the demonstrations and Alex’s account from afterwards.)

Update: It’s interesting to see what Lord West had to say about the G20 before it happened. Speaking in the Lords, he was in chipper mood. City workers might have advised to dress down during the protests, but he was planning to “dress up slightly”. Oh how his fellow peers laughed!

Asked whether young people should be allowed to protest about financial issues and climate change, the ex-First Sea Lord replied:

I have a number of youngsters myself [presumably, he's referring to his children, not the herd of semi-feral youth he grazes on his back lawn]. The young people in this country are generally very good. I have been very impressed with the cadet forces and all sorts of groups, so I would certainly not say that they are all anarchists.

However, as I said, when there are so many thousands of people involved some will be troublemakers who are not there to be peaceful demonstrators. They do not have deep-held feelings about these things but are there for other reasons and ulterior motives. That is extremely unfortunate.

Perhaps we should expect keelhauling for troublemakers with ulterior motives to be proposed in the next Criminal Justice bill…

Update II: Here’s another weird one. Asked by Pauline Neville-Jones what monitoring of social network sites was undertaken by “government departments, agencies or bodies”, Lord West offered a flat denial: “The Government do [sic] not monitor social networking sites.” What at all? You have to be kidding me…

In the FT, Gideon Rachman argues that yesterday’s conference walkout during Ahmadinejad’s speech will be bad for Ban Ki-Moon:

Rather than walking away from a conference that was obviously turning into a farce, Ban Ki-Moon – the UN secretary-general – has thrown his prestige behind the meeting This looks like a bad mistake. With the Obama administration in power, the US is clearly keen on the idea of re-engaging with the UN. Obama has made Susan Rice, one of his closest aides, ambassador to the UN – and given her a cabinet position. But the Geneva conference will play into the hands of all the UN-haters in America.

So how have the UN-haters reacted? By pretending the walkout didn’t happen. Take the National Review’s coverage. Steven Groves and Brett D. Schaefer, from the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, are sending back dispatches from Durban II, reflecting the importance of the event to the American right.

Yesterday, Groves and Schaefer reported that Ahmadinejad “rose to great applause from many of the government delegates and, shamefully, from some of the NGOs. Some protestors did rush the stage wearing clown wigs, but they were removed.” They then provide a brief account of the Iranian President’s speech and note that he “concluded his remarks to great applause among a portion of the delegates.”

That’s right. The bit in the middle – a classic piece of summit drama, with Europe’s delegates storming out – doesn’t even get a mention! Mark Steyn, meanwhile, argues that the conference marks the “mainstreaming” of Ahmadinejad, an act that exceeds Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler:

It is in the face of far more public and more explicit eliminationist threats. And, unlike Chamberlain’s generation, this crowd will not be able to plead that what was being planned was so unprecedented it was beyond their capacity to imagine: Every time Ahmadinejad denies the reality of the last Holocaust, he reminds the Merzes [the Swiss President] of the world that the apologists for those planning its sequel won’t have the excuse that they didn’t know it was coming.

Steyn, who sees his role as “explaining” Europe’s decline to the American public, delights in weaving a sick fantasy for his audience. European countries are overrun by immigrants. They are thus desperate to abase themselves to any Muslim leader, whatever the cost. 

When the facts – a noisy European boycott, for example – don’t fit. He, like Groves and Schaefer, simply airbrushes them out. As the saying goes: if the facts don’t fit the story, change the facts.

Update: For those of your interested in a primer on Steyn’s world view, see Jules in the comments below, or this post from last year…

Update II:  I should note that Groves and Schaefer have now acknowledged the EU walkout. I still can’t understand how they missed it from their contemporaneous post on Ahmadinejad’s speech, but there is a reference to it in their latest dispatch.

Update III: Welcome, visitors, from Mark Steyn’s website, where he has bestowed on me the honour of ‘reader of the day’. To pay back the favour, I’ve collected together some of the greatest hits from a man who dreams of Europe in flames, ‘darker forces’, and ‘white flight’. Read the whole thing.

Like most of you, I spend most of my days weeping at the fate of rich. But I don’t think I’d realised how bad things were, until I came across Gabriel Sherman’s definitive account.

You should probably get your senior executive assistant to read you the whole thing, but if you’re been forced to cull the hired help, the key themes are: (i) Make sure we, the rich, are paid more than anyone else, even if we go bust. (ii) Don’t expect us to foot the bill from the bailout – tax the sheeple instead. (iii) Money isn’t enough – we demand deference and respect.

Here are some of the quotes that made me tear up:

Citigroup exec: “No offense to Middle America, but if someone went to Columbia or Wharton, [even if] their company is a fumbling, mismanaged bank, why should they all of a sudden be paid the same as the guy down the block who delivers restaurant supplies for Sysco out of a huge, shiny truck?”

Bankrupt Wall Street exec: “I think [Obama] doesn’t have an appreciation for how hard it is to build these companies, the blood, sweat, and tears that goes into them. It’s just that he has no passion for it.” 

Bear Stearns senior managing director: “Honestly, you can pick on Wall Street all you want, I don’t think it’s fair. It’s fair to say you ran your companies into the ground, your risk management is flawed-that is perfectly legitimate. You can lay criticism on GM or others. But I don’t think it’s fair to say Wall Street is paid too much.”

Wall Street exec: “Why are [we] being punished for making a lot of money?”

Hedge fund guy: “The government wants me to be a slave!”

Another hedge fund guy: “JPMorgan and all these guys should go on strike—see what happens to the country without Wall Street.”

I’d also highly recommend reading the Economist’s typically incisive analysis. The stakes are high, it warns. Raise taxes on the rich and you’re on a slippery slope towards fascism, genocide and global conflict:

Barack Obama has suggested raising the tax rates on high earners and closing loopholes such as the carried-interest privilege enjoyed by private-equity managers. Such tax changes may suit the public mood. The danger is that popular anger, once released, can fasten on targets beyond the rich; immigrants, say, or foreigners generally. The 1930s Depression led to fascism in Germany and the second world war. Even if such apocalypses are avoided, the anti-rich backlash can [still] go too far. 

So, repeat after me, “They came first for the rich, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t rich. Then they came for the Jews…”

The smeargate story rumbles on, though the reporting on it is patchy. I thought the Evening Standard, on Tuesday evening, got right to the heart of it, pointing out the key points: particularly that Brown invited Derek Draper for lunch at Chequers the week after Draper had set up the Red Rag website, so the idea this was all going on without Brown’s knowledge is not tenable.

Guido Fawkes, the Tory hero of the hour, has a hilarious diary in this week’s Spectator, recounting his week, including him sending a quote from the film Conan the Barbarian to McBride the day that the story exploded: ‘What is best in life? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women’, then his wife ticking him off, saying ‘why would you do that? You might put us in danger – These are powerful people.’

I like the sound of Guido. Anyone who ran illegal acid house raves in the late eighties is alright by me. One of the slurs put about by McBride, by the way, is that Osborne raved it up at Guido’s warehouse dos. That would win my vote.

He’s also a cunning little fella. He did a politics show debate with Derek Draper back in late March, and first of all, he wore a Berkeley Univ. t-shirt, which he now admits was a wind-up of Draper, who claimed to have studied psychology at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, which implies the institute is at Berkeley University – it’s not, it’s just in the town.

And he stitched Draper up in that show, getting him to deny he was fed stories by Damian McBride, when in fact Guido already had the emails in his possession, so knew that Draper had just lied on TV. Sly.

Martin Bright, in the Spectator’s Coffee House blog, also makes a very good point:

The Prime Minister’s belated apology suggests that he now knows how toxic this has become. He is right to be angry because McBride has put his government at the mercy of a maverick right-wing libertarian blogger. Quite why he and the people around him became quite so fixated on Paul Staines (aka Guido Fawkes), is completely beyond me. But they were genuinely obsessed, that much is clear.

This is another key point, that I’ve also made. Why the hell were Labour so obsessed with Guido and Iain Dale? They weren’t columnists on the Sun. They hardly had the nation’s ear. But yet Labour big-wigs were obsessed. Hazel Blears attacked them in a speech. John Prescott warned them “we’re taking over”. Draper managed to get £100,000 in union money just to take them on.This shows how out of touch, and out of ideas, Labour have become.

It really reminds me of the Kremlin’s paranoid obsession with CIA-funded ‘colour revolutions’ in Ukraine and Georgia. The KGB, sorry, FSB, was obsessed with the idea that these revolutions weren’t genuine democratic movements, but merely CIA-funded operations (and yes the CIA did put some money in, but speak to anyone in Kiev and you’ll know these were also genuine democratic protests), so the FSB then spent hundreds of millions on their own fake democratic youth movements,  like the carefully-orchestrated and amply funded youth movement, Nashi.

LabourList is the blog equivalent of Nashi – it pretends to be grass roots, but is really state-sponsored astro-turf.

This brings me to another question. If blogs become the front-line of party political battles, then will we start having proxy wars via the blogs, with leading bloggers acting, in effect, like Hezbollah, as the guerrila covers for covert party actions against each other?  That. I guess, is what Red Rag was intended to be.

Anyway, the thing that most struck me about the scandal is that it is, IMHO, the first big political scandal we have seen unfold in front of our eyes, on blogs and on Twitter, and then roll down from the hills onto TV news and the newspapers. It has been an interactive scandal, dare I say it, a fun scandal, and that is in great part thanks to Fawkes and Dale. So yes, lots of talk about how the scandal has brought down the level of politics, but I think in some ways it has raised it, from the citizen’s point of view. We are all Wooodward and Bernstein now.

Russia is now demanding that NATO halt its planned military exercises in Georgia. On a visit to Armenia, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that the planned NATO exercises risk further undermining stability in the troubled Caucasus region. That is a bit rich, given that Moscow has effectively dismembered Georgia and is perpetuating the conflict by continuing to deploy forces in the region. 

But what should NATO do? There is obviously no point in undermining the emerging détente between the US and Russia, promoted by the Obama administration. Yet at the same time, the thaw in relations should not allow Russia to play its bullyboy games. I told a journalist today:

The new relations could oblige NATO to reconsider the exercises in Georgia, as long as this is done not just to please Russia but because we are rethinking how to engage Russia and Geogia.

It is worth elaborating a little on this. The strategic context has clearly changed and NATO probably needs to appreciate this. The alliance cannot afford to be out of synch with its largest stakeholder. NATO’s Russia policy cannot be about Georgia alone, just as the West’s China policy cannot only be about Tibet. But any review of policy must not be seen as bowing to Russian pressure or stepping away from NATO’s “open door” policy – which welcomes new, peaceful democratic members if they wish to join.

William Lind is (along with Martin van Creveld) the godfather of fourth generation warfare theory, so it’s worth sitting up straight when he publishes his 300th On War column and decides to distil the lessons of the previous 299 columns down into three points.  Here they are, together with his conclusion:

1. So long as America pursues an offensive grand strategy, Fourth Generation war will ensure her defeat. The reason is Martin van Creveld’s concept of the power of weakness and its intimate relationship with legitimacy. In a Fourth Generation world, legitimacy is the coin of the realm. At root, Fourth Generation war is a contest for legitimacy between the state and a wide variety of non-state primary loyalties. American power lacks legitimacy because, on the physical level, it is so overwhelming. That is the power of weakness: anyone who stands up to the American military becomes a hero. In turn, any state the American military supports loses its legitimacy. The more places America intervenes militarily, the more states lose their legitimacy, to the advantage of Fourth Generation, non-state entities. In effect, we have a reverse Midas touch. Only a defensive grand strategy, where we mind our own business and leave other states to mind theirs, can break us out of this downward spiral.
2. Second Generation militaries cannot win Fourth Generation wars. Second Generation armed forces, such as those of the United States, fight by putting firepower on targets. This wins at the physical level, but as it does so it brings defeat at the moral level, which is decisive in 4GW. The best current example is Pakistan, where the combination of Predator strikes and arm-twisting of the Pakistani government has undermined the legitimacy of the Pakistani state. That state now stands on the verge of disintegration, which would give al Qaeda and other Islamic 4GW forces the greatest victory they could imagine. The image on Osama’s cave wall should be a Predator, with the title, “Our best weapon.”
3. There is no chance America will adopt a defensive grand strategy or reform its military to move from the Second to the Third Generation – a necessary though not sufficient step in confronting 4GW – so long as the current Washington Establishment remains in power. That Establishment is drunk on hubris, cut off from the world beyond court politics and thoroughly corrupted by Pentagon “business as usual,” which knows how to buy whatever political support it needs. Like all establishments, it sees any real change as a threat, to be avoided. So long as it reigns, nothing will change.

What are the implications of these three observations? Militarily, they portend continued failure and defeat. We will fail to get out of Iraq before the next phase of that war begins, or, worse, an Israeli attack on Iran costs us the army we have in Iraq. We will be defeated in Afghanistan, because we will refuse to scale our strategic objectives to what is possible and we will continue to alienate the population with our firepower-intensive way of war.

We will push Pakistan over the brink into disintegration, which will be a strategic catastrophe of the first order. We will ignore the disintegration of the state in Mexico, while importing Mexico’s disorder through our ineffective border controls. We will not even be able to stop Somali pirates. What does it say about us when the whole nation rejoices because the U.S. Navy, the most powerful navy on earth, defeated four Somali teenagers?

It does not end with this. These foreign policy failures and military defeats – or even more embarrassing “victories” – become just two of a larger series of crises, including the economic crisis (depression followed by runaway inflation), foreign exchange crisis (collapse of the dollar), political crisis (no one in the Establishment knows what to do, but the Establishment offers the voters no alternative to itself), energy crisis, etc. Together, these discrete crises snowball into a systemic crisis, which is what happens when the outside world demands greater change than the political system permits. At that point, the political system collapses and is replaced by something else. In the old days, it meant a change of dynasty. What might it mean today? My guess is a radical devolution, at the conclusion of which life is once again local.

That would be, on the whole, a happy outcome. But I fear this will be a trip where the journey is not half the fun.

Back in January, David posted a video of two police officers asking a man to stop filming them, telling him it was an offence to do so.  The man stood his ground, arguing that it was entirely legal for him to film them, and defying them to cite a specific piece of legislation that would prevent him from doing so.  The two officers then radioed their sergeant – who informed them that the man filming them was, in fact, within his rights.

Well, that was then; but things have been rather different since 16 February, when the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 entered into force. As Amnesty International UK explain on their blog, the 2008 Act

…amends the Terrorism Act 2000 regarding offences relating to information about members of armed forces, a member of the intelligence services, or a police officer.

The new set of rules, under section 76 of the 2008 Act and section 58A of the 2000 Act, will target anyone who ‘elicits or attempts to elicit information about (members of armed forces) … which is of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’.

The new laws are now in place and they allow for the arrest – and imprisonment – of anyone who takes pictures of officers ‘likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism’.

In the current circumstances (Metropolitan Police embarrassed twice within the space of a week by film of its officers assaulting members of the public; two IPCC inquiries underway; Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police having had to launch an independent review of its public order policing tactics) it’s worth asking: just how much scope is there in interpreting what kind of filming is “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism”? 

Quite a lot, one suspects. Which is another reason why we ought to be clear that neither a review of policing tactics, nor inquiries into the conduct of individual oficers, nor the possibility of the IPCC bringing prosections against individual officers, is sufficient here. 

The core problem at the heart of this is legislative – not just the 2008 Counter-Terrorism Act, but also the Terrorism Act 2000, the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, the Terrorism Act 2006, the Racial and Religious Hatred Act 2006.. and so on, and so on.

We now need to look in the round at whether we’ve lost the balace between protection against terrorism and protecting the legitimate right of citizens to protest. And that’s why why we ought to be pushing for an independent Royal Commission to undertake a wholesale review of counter-terrorism, policing and civil liberties.

From today until May 13 the world’s largest democracy will be heading to the polls. India’s voters will be electing 543 members of parliament in the country’s fifteenth election. The figures alone are awesome: 800,000 polling booths run by six million election staff will cater to the 714 million eligible voters. Some of the booths will be perched on mountain tops in Kashmir, others placed near the beaches of Goa. The results, to be announced on May 16, will shape the Indian subcontinent for the next few years.

Opinion polls have the left-leaning Congress party of incumbent Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the main opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) neck and neck, with neither party likely to govern alone. So the stage is set the scene for horse-trading with a “Third Front” alliance and an array of regional and other smaller parties. One potential kingmaker is Kumari Mayawati, who is bidding to become the nation’s first Dalit – or bottom-rung caste – prime minister

Though issues such as poverty and how best to develop the countryside have been debated, in the wake of the last year’s Islamic militant attacks on Mumbai this year has seen national security become a major theme.

Security analysts fear the electoral consequences of another Mumbai-style terrorist attack. If that were to happen – and links back to Pakistani established — the current government would be hard-pressed to act against Pakistan in some. BJP would certainly be braying for tough action.

Even if the elections take place relatively quietly (with 714 million people voting, allow for some violence) India’s relationship with Pakistan is likely to remain fraught. Relations between the two countries have never been warm, but the five-year peace dialogue has now most definitely ended. Barring another terrorist atrocity, a direct confrontation between the two powers may be unlikely, but both governments will continue their proxy conflicts. This is bad news for Afghanistan, which plays host to the conflict. Neither the Congress Party nor the BJP seems to be willing to think through how to revert the Indian-Pakistani cycle of conflict.

The other national security issue both parties have been ducking is how to deal with Obama’s goals of reviving the nonproliferation system. Indian policy-makers of all stripes want to implement the US-India nuclear accord, and worry that the new US nonproliferation agenda will undercut this. But the Indian establishment does not appear to have  thought through how New Delhi might participate in an inclusive nonproliferation regime.

Whoever ultimately wins this week’s election — BJP or Congress — will have to tackle India-Pakistan relations and the US nonproliferation agenda  — the Obama administration is unlikely to give them much choice.

In the US, hundreds of millions of right wing ‘tea baggers’ (yes – really) are protesting against “illegitimate President Barack Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus package.” (Illegitimate here refers not to Obama’s parenthood, but to the fantasy he’s not a citizen.)

Protestors had collected a million tea bags to dump in Washington, but they didn’t have their paperwork in order:

“We have a million tea bags here, and we don’t have a place to put them because it’s not on our permit,” said Rebecca Wales, lead organizer of D.C. Tea Party.

The tea bags were, instead, dropped off at a local conservative think tank. I bet Obama’s grassroots organisers are quaking in their boots.

Mohammed al Qurani, a young Chadian inmate of Guantanamo who’s been detained there for the last seven years, got permission to call a relative earlier this week – but used the chance instead to call Sami al-Hajj, an Al Jazeera cameraman who spent six years in Guantanamo before his release last year.  It’s the first known interview with a current Guantanamo inmate.  In his own words:

There has been no change in the administration of Guantanamo. The people managing the detainees there haven’t changed yet. These are the same people who were there during the Bush years and so they use the same methods.

From Al Jazeera’s coverage:

[Al Qurani said that] the alleged ill-treatment “started about 20 days” before Barack Obama became US president and “since then I’ve been subjected to it almost every day”.

[snip]

 Describing a specific incident, which took place after change in the US administration, al-Qurani said he had refused to leave his cell because they were “not granting me my rights”, such as being able to walk around, interact with other inmates and have “normal food”. A group of six soldiers wearing protective gear and helmets entered his cell, accompanied by one soldier carrying a camera and one with tear gas, he said. “They had a thick rubber or plastic baton they beat me with. They emptied out about two canisters of tear gas on me,” he told Al Jazeera. “After I stopped talking, and tears were flowing from my eyes, I could hardly see or breathe.

“They then beat me again to the ground, one of them held my head and beat it against the ground. I started screaming to his senior ‘see what he’s doing, see what he’s doing’ [but] his senior started laughing and said ‘he’s doing his job’. He broke one of my front teeth. Of course they didn’t film the blood, they filmed my back so it doesn’t show.”

Obama has got to sort this out.  Announcing plans for closure on his second day in office is great, and it’s widely understood that it’ll take time to figure out where the detainees will go after its closure – but in the meantime, according to Reprieve, conditions in the camp are getting worse, with an increase in the number of reported incidents in Camp Five (one of the isolation camps).

Just did an interesting interview with Neil Eckert, the CEO of Climate Exchange PLC.

They’re the private company that owns the European Climate Exchange, which does 95% of the trading in EU carbon permits and CERs, and the Chicago Climate Exchange, which does all the existing carbon trading in the US. It also owns the only carbon exchange in China, and has pilot projects in India and Australia.

So in other words, they completely dominate a global market that is about to boom. Smart fellows.

One thing he mentioned that interested me is that the company is currently doing a pilot scheme to introduce a cap and trade market at the Great Lakes for water.

Eckert said: ‘Trading water is not that difficult. You cap extraction rights for a source, such as the Great Lakes, and then allow the main extractors to trade quotas among themselves.”

He expects an international water trading market to grow up: ‘If water becomes more and more scarce, people are going to be pumping it over long distances, like oil. The Middle East, in particular, could be a big buyer of water rights.’

As it happens, the Economist suggested using cap and trade for water in its latest issue. Synchronicity or what.