by David Steven | Apr 22, 2009 | Climate and resource scarcity, UK
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.
by David Steven | Apr 21, 2009 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia, North America
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…)
by David Steven | Apr 21, 2009 | Conflict and security, UK
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…
by David Steven | Apr 21, 2009 | Cooperation and coherence, North America
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.
by David Steven | Apr 20, 2009 | What we're watching
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjAOrNn36Ns&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]
