You will see headlines and hear news items to the effect that there is only so many days (just over a month now) to get a climate protection “deal” at Copenhagen. There the nations of the world will meet in order to try and reach agreement as to the best way to protect the climate and how to divide the burden of protecting the climate between themselves. The leaders of the world’s nations, particularly those that are democratically elected, will put in an appearance in order to try and reach some kind of an agreement. They will in fact reach some kind of agreement and no doubt Mr Obama, Mr Brown and the rest will claim credit but I doubt whether the agreement they reach will be judged by history as being important or significant.
Climate change is not of immediate danger and because there is no perceived immediate peril nations of the world will be content to fudge the issues and treat Copenhagen as simply another small step along the road that gets us to climate protection.
It is clear that the leaders of the world will not be brave enough, or long sighted enough or secure enough to make those very hard decisions that need to be made to protect the climate.
If you take a small example from the United Kingdom you will see just how reluctant leaders are to make the hard decisions.
In the United Kingdom the maximum speed limit for cars is 70 miles an hour. However on roads where a maximum speed limit is allowed the average speed is around 50 miles an hour and I expect that the mean speed would be around 55 miles an hour. Virtually every car consumes far less fuel at 50 or 55 miles an hour than it does at 70 miles an hour.
It therefore seems to be logical and cost effective to reduce the maximum speed to around 50 or 55 miles an hour, thereby saving fuel which will in turn save emissions of carbon dioxide. It will not cost anything to carry out this measure and will not make much of a difference to journey times by road, although it will be inconvenient to some that like to drive fast.
Yet the United Kingdom government – along with governments in Germany France and Italy – have no plans to reduce maximum speed limits on roads. If governments cannot make decisions like this to protect the climate how can we hope that they will make the much harder decisions that they need to make at Copenhagen?
Filed under: United Nations Climate Change Conference, carbon dioxide, carbon emissions, climate change, energy, global warming, gordon brown | Tagged: climate protection, copenhagen climate conference, maximum speed limits on roads
