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Last week, the Institute of Mechanical Engineers published their report, saying that the UK’s climate change strategy – i.e. covering the entire country with expensive wind turbines – will not meet the targets they are designed to meet.
the UK is already losing the climate change mitigation battle. The greenhouse gas emission targets set by the Government require a rate of reduction that has never been achieved by even the most progressive nations in the world. The Institution’s latest report, Climate Change: have we lost the battle? argues that if the UK is realistically going to reach an outcome equivalent to a reduction of 80% by 2050, we need to start mapping out an alternative solution using all engineering methods possible and not only relying on mitigation.
I don’t believe it is necessary, anyway. But that’s beside the point. The point is that according to the very people who we turn to for their expertise, the strategy is not working, and cannot work.
The Guardian quotes a Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) spokesman,
The Institute of Mechanical Engineer's can't do, won't do attitude is sending out a defeatist message ahead of the crucial climate change talks in Copenhagen. The truth is that if we act now we can not only beat climate change but gain from the green benefits that will flow in terms of jobs and investment from going low carbon.
Never let the facts get in the way of a good bit of policy-making, eh?
DECC seem quite happy to go to Copenhagen to pursue an international agreement on climate change under the misapprehension that they know how to ‘save the planet’.
Imagine taking your car to a garage, and asking the mechanics there to make it fly.
“We can’t”, they would say.
Would you complain about their “can’t-do-won’t-do-attitude”, because the mechanics weren’t able to fulfil the promises you had made about getting a flying car?
Take note – the Institute of Mechanical engineers aren’t saying “there’s no such thing as climate change”. They aren’t “deniers”. They are not saying “there is no problem”. But they are saying that there is a difference between the targets the Government have set, and the likely outcome of their policies.
But of course, saving the planet has got nothing to do with it, as I have discussed in previous blog posts.This is just about political and social engineering, not technical engineering.
This is revealed in poll by The Times.
The revelation that ministers have failed in their campaign to persuade the public that the greenhouse effect is a serious threat requiring urgent action will make uncomfortable reading for the Government as it prepares for next month’s climate change summit in Copenhagen.
Only 41 per cent accept as an established scientific fact that global warming is taking place and is largely man-made. Almost a third (32 per cent) believe that the link is not yet proved; 8 per cent say that it is environmentalist propaganda to blame man and 15 per cent say that the world is not warming.
Tory voters are more likely to doubt the scientific evidence that man is to blame. Only 38 per cent accept it, compared with 45 per cent of Labour supporters and 47 per cent of Liberal Democrat voters.
The major parties cannot even appeal to their own voters to support them in the creation of policies that will have the most dramatic effect on the British economy, ever.
People don’t quite understand this yet, but once all of the planned policies are in place, people who have gone to bed the night before in what they understood to be a liberal democracy will wake up in something resembling Soviet Russia. There will be shortages of expensive, low quality of food. It will be cold. There will be power cuts. You will not be allowed to travel as you wish. Jobs –if they still exist – will be make-work employment that is dull, pointless, and increasingly labour-intensive. And that's if we're lucky. At least Soviet Russia attempted to be an industrial. We might end up with something far more medieval.
If you don’t like these policies, tough luck, because none of the parties is offering you the choice. You will be green, whether you like it or not.
Explain this. Most people don’t buy into the climate change myth. This is an established fact. Most people are sceptical at least of the science, but even more so of the policies. Yet each of the major parties is claiming to be the one that will save mankind. Why?
David Miliband moans about the public’s disinterest in climate change,
For a lot of people the penny hasn’t dropped that this climate change challenge is real and is happening now. There isn’t yet that feeling of urgency and drive and animation about the Copenhagen conference.
An excellent comment on the Times’ website answers the Foreign Secretary,
Oh the pennies are dropping, David. They're dropping right into your bloody pockets.
The evidence is clear. There is a lack of demand for environmental politics. Engineers point out that the policies designed by our government and those proposed by the other two parties will not work. The government blame the public and the engineers, and go to Copenhagen to build an international agreement on climate change mitigation, so that they can put their policies out of your reach.
Just as it is almost impossible for you to have any kind of say about what happens in Europe, if a deal is made at Copenhagen, it will make it much, much harder to reverse the UK’s climate policies. Only, at least with the EU, you can elect Euro-Sceptics, like me, who can at least try to challenge the steady erosion of our democracy. But there won’t be any such opportunity after a deal at Copenhagen. You can forget it. This is about control.
