Date published: 2008/09/20
The BBC says:
A number of UK business leaders have called for "urgent and comprehensive" measures from the main political parties to tackle climate change.
The Prince of Wales's UK Corporate Leaders Group on Climate Change said "deep and rapid" cuts were needed in greenhouse gas emissions.
The group includes the bosses of Tesco, BAA, Shell and energy group E.ON.
Greenpeace accused some of those involved of "hypocrisy of a previously unknown magnitude".
In a letter to the three major party leaders, the business leaders urged them not to allow fears of an economic slowdown to divert them from forging a cross-party consensus on policies to cut emissions.
They wrote: "We now urgently need cross-party effort to develop a comprehensive package of policy measures to change every major sector of the economy."
They said "incremental change" would be insufficient to deal with the threat of climate change.
Action would benefit business by stimulating the economy and reducing costs associated with a changing climate, they added.
But Greenpeace communications director Ben Stewart said: "It's astounding that E.ON would call for action on climate change when they're agitating to build Britain's first coal-fired power stations in decades.
"It makes an environmentalist's jaw drop to see the BAA logo on this letter when they're trying to expand airports across the nation."
It's amazing how many people suck up to royalty. And the phrase "fears of an economic slowdown" is a bit silly. Britain is pretty much already in a recession. Although the bosses of major corporations don't even notice (what's a few hundred thousand in pay gone missing here or there) the ordinary people of Britain notice. Unfortunately the accounting system for emissions is completely bogus (they are accounted for at the point of production rather than the point of consumption). So Britain can pretend to have fewer emissions than is true. The only way to get real "deep and rapid cuts" in emissions is to shut down the economy, and in particular to hammer the working class. Well, the recession is already doing that, to some extent, and the price of oil is going to get worse and worse in future, so emissions on that side will come down of their own accord. Coal is the open question. Although Greenpeace has been hysterical about this new coal-fired power plant (including committing an act of vandalism which they got away with), it is fairly obvious that coal is going to continue to play a big role in world energy sources for a very long time. The real question, then, is whether sequestration can be made to work for coal (and hopefully, eventually, this specific new plant will use this technology). Unfortunately. the so-called environmentalists don't want sequestration to work. It's far too much like "business as usual", and they have a pathological hatred of that. Hence the posturing that is a permanent feature of their comments on the BBC website.
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