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Ed Miliband has admitted that the talks leading up to the UN Copenhagen Conference next month “are moving too slowly and not going well".
Good. Because such a deal would be a disaster for everyone in the world, except those involved in negotiating it.
Miliband, the government, and many environmental activists – the kind of people who try to shut down power stations – wanted the conference to produce an international legally binding agreement to limit the amount of emissions each country is allowed to produce.
Some people really don’t understand why I, or any other so-called ‘denier’, would want to disagree with these aims. Why would anyone be against an international agreement to save the planet?
The simple answer is that I don’t believe that the science says we are endangering the planet. Instead, I think the real danger comes from letting people like Miliband (and Prescott, see my previous blog post) decide what laws and regulations we should all be subject to.
The UK’s domestic climate change legislation, and EU regulations are already making life harder and more expensive for ordinary people. An international agreement would enable autocrats to press harder on the British public, to tax them, and to stifle the businesses that employ them and create opportunities for them. Then, when people start protesting, these same autocrats could turn around and say, “hey, it’s not us, it’s these international rules that are making us do this, we can’t do anything about it.”
Consider the words of Miliband, for instance.
"We would have preferred a full legal treaty, it has to be said. I think the important thing about the agreement we now seek in December is that while it may be a political agreement it must lead, on a very clear timetable, to a legally binding treaty."
He “would have preferred a full legal treaty”, he says.
But what right has he got to express his own preference for a treaty that binds the UK to an agreement, when the British public have had no say in it?
A recent You Gov survey for the Department for Energy and Climate Change found that 52% of people in Britain didn’t believe that climate change would affect them.
The government have not persuaded the public of the need for the legally-binding international agreements that they are creating, for the EU regulations that they are submitting to, and for the domestic policies such as the Climate Change Act and the ‘Green New Deal’/Low Carbon Industrial Strategy.
Most people think this is all so much hot air, the waffle of pointless bureaucratic busy-bodies.
Along comes Joan Ruddock, the Energy and Climate Change Minister, to explain the government’s failure to win the argument.
“The survey results show that people don’t realise that climate change is already under way and could have severe consequences. With over 40 per cent of the UK’s C02 emissions a result of personal choices, there is huge potential for individual behaviour change to lower emissions.”
Ruddock forgets, of course, that, as I have explained in my previous posts here, climate change has been postponed. But at the same time, she lets it slip what this is all about: “behaviour change”.
The government wants you to behave!
That’s why it needs international agreements. It knows that you’re not so stupid as to believe a word it says about climate change, and it knows you won’t vote for it.
