Whistling in the wind
From George Monbiot, a sobering alarm about some of the emergency measures we need to take now:
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"Last week a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters produced what could be the first hard evidence that runaway global feedback has begun(7). In 2007, methane levels in the atmosphere, which had previously levelled off, began rising again. The most likely reason is that the Siberian permafrost is melting, as a result of the runaway warming of the Arctic. This wasn’t supposed to happen for another 80 years. The great global meltdown appears to have started, yet Turner proposes that we carry on with the old plan as if nothing has changed. We’re still digging trenches, even as the sky fills with bomber planes.
My reading of the new projections suggests that to play its part in preventing two degrees of global warming, the UK needs to cut greenhouse gases by roughly 25% from current levels by the end of 2012 - a quarter in four years. But how the heck could this be done? Here is a list of measures which could be enacted almost immediately. They require no economic or technological miracles; but they do demand that the government is brave enough to govern.
1. Immediately renegotiate the European Emissions Trading Scheme, imposing a lower cap on carbon pollution and the mandatory sale of all emissions permits to the industries covered by the scheme (at the moment over 90% are given away(8)).
2. Use the money this raises for:
a. A crash programme for training builders. As the major component of a green new deal, delivering jobs as well as carbon cuts, the government will immediately launch training schemes for tens of thousands of specialist builders, insulators, window-fitters, plasterers and decorators.
b. A home improvement scheme like Germany’s, but twice as fast. Every year between January 2010 and 2020, 10% of homes will be fully insulated and fitted with good windows or secondary glazing, at state expense. Landlords will have a legal obligation to join or lose their right to take tenants. Announce that when the scheme is complete, gas and electricity bills will be subject to an escalating tariff: the more you use, the more you will have to pay for every unit.
3. Announce that incandescent lightbulbs will no longer be sold in the United Kingdom by next April. Announce that no fridge or freezer with an energy rating below grade A++ and no other appliance rated below grade A will be sold from July.
4. Increase vehicle excise duty for the most polluting cars to £3000 a year (from the current £400). Use the money this raises to:
a. Start closing key urban streets to private cars and dedicating them to public transport and cycling.
b. Increase the public subsidy for bus and train journeys. Oblige the bus companies to sign contracts providing a wider range of services. Give us the integrated low-carbon transport we have long been promised, in which buses are scheduled to meet trains, trains and buses carry bicycles and safe cycle lanes connect with eachother across entire cities.
c. Train thousands of new coach drivers and public transport operators. Create coach lanes on all the motorways and start moving coach stations from the city centres to the motorway junctions, to enable coach travel to become as fast and efficient as car travel. Link them to city centres with dedicated bus lanes(9).
d. Scrap the airport expansion programme. Set a cap on the number of landing slots, which will fall every year until it reaches 5% of current capacity.
5. Stop the burning of moorland: because this exposes and oxidises peat, grouse shoots (which are mostly responsible) produce a staggering proportion of the UK’s emissions(10).
6. Stop all opencast coal mining and rescind planning permission for new works. Impose stonking taxes on the extraction of all fossil fuels.
Is this enough? No. But it puts us on the right track. It’s all a gamble from now on: the only reliable advice is that we shouldn’t start from here. But two decades of procrastination ensure that only emergency measures now have a chance of preventing a climate disaster. What Turner’s report - polite, measured and impressive as it is - proposes is more procrastination.