I'm all for putting more vehicles on our roads. As long as they're coaches (George Monbiot, UK)

[jpak]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1963958,00.html

There was one proposal in Sir Rod Eddington's report to the Treasury with which, when I first read it, I wholeheartedly agreed. He insists that "the transport sector, including aviation, should meet its full environmental costs". Quite right too: every time someone dies as a result of floods in Bangladesh, an airline executive should be dragged out of his office and drowned.

Reading on, I realised that this is not exactly what he had in mind. Instead, he meant that airports can keep expanding and the capacity of roads can be increased, as long as people pay more money for their pollution. He has even been so kind as to put a price on other people's lives: £70 per tonne of carbon. This, we discover, is the "social cost" of global warming, derived by the British government's department for the environment, and unquestioningly accepted by Eddington, who was charged by Gordon Brown with keeping the country moving.

But what the heck does it mean? Does the government believe we can put a price on Bangladesh? On the people threatened by drought in the Horn of Africa? On coral reefs, rainforests and tundra? On the security of global food supplies? When the Stern review was published, some of us warned that people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing would interpret it as a licence to reduce the argument to a dispute about financial costs. This is what Eddington has now done. As long as the books are balanced, the problem is deemed to have been solved.

Even if we were to accept his outrageous terms of reference, and even if we were to agree with his proposition that an ever-expanding transport sector is compatible with "sustainability", there is an omission in Eddington's report. It is a dirty word beginning with c, which cannot be uttered in the presence of politicians. In 436 pages, the coach is mentioned only in the last volume, and then just to provide historical price comparisons with other modes of transport. As a current or future option, it does not, in Eddington's world, exist.

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[jobycom]

1. Coaches like Tom Coughlin? He should be hitting the road soon.

:)

Sorry.

[jpak]

3. LOL!!!

:toast:

[phantom power]

2. George was just cribbing off my old pro-bus posts.

:evilgrin:

[GliderGuider]

4. I just finished HEAT this morning - it didn't cheer me up.

The suggestions he makes that are technically feasible will only become socially or politically acceptable after the crisis hits. He fails to address the global scope of the problem and the potential for selfish national actors to undermine any mitigation effort. Worst of all from my perspective is that he fails to address the interactions between climate change, oil depletion and food scarcity - interactions that will make each problem harder to mitigate as the others get worse. In the last chapter of the book he basically says, "It's a long shot, but we just might pull it off, but we won't because we'd be asking people to voluntarily become poorer, and they just won't do that." That statement I agree with.

In my opinion any mitigation proposal that starts from a premise of maintaining Business As Usual is fatally flawed and isn't worth the skull-sweat it took to commit to paper. Monbiot is a nice guy and his heart's in the right place, but he hasn't yet worked up the courage to tell either us or himself the hard truth about the predicament we're in.

Here's the global problematique:

• Climate change
  
• Oil and natural gas depletion
  
• Depletion of soil fertility and fresh water reserves
  
• Deforestation and desertification
  
• Decline in the global grain supply
  
• Depletion of ocean fish stocks
  
• Massive extinctions
  
• Biodiversity loss
  
• Socioeconomic instability

All of these problems interact. You can't deal with them one at a time in isolation. They are all coming to a head and making their consequences felt simultaneously, right now.

I suspect very strongly that the opportunity to avoid calamity is long past. If we had one of these problems to face we might be able to mitigate it. It would be a stretch, but we could do it. Two at a time? I start to get doubtful. Three at once? Not a chance. There are nine problems in my little list. Any approach to saving our skins that begins "In order to retain our current standard of living we must..." is contemptible hoodwinkery.

It was a brave try, Mr. Monbiot, but all it has done is solidify my conviction about the true depth of the problem. For that I am, perversely, grateful.

[Nihil]

5. Excellent summary. (n/t)