Bali

Bali seems a strange place for an environmental conference, given the vast Indonesian carbon footprint from ploughing up rainforest. But this was a conference about having a conference, so that’s OK. The world has turned up there to play the blame game, the developed world breast-beating over how much they have industrialised, the less developed countries saying they haven’t really got into this pollution thing and ought to be given a chance. I have two problems with all this.

The first is the absence of complete data. If a western country closes a smokestack industry and transfers it to a Less Developed Country, the recorded (guilt-based) figures for total emissions go down because the LDC is excluded from the calculations. But in fact it has not just stayed the same but gone up because we then ship the goods back to the West. And does anybody know what the leakages from Russia’s pipeline system are? One industry insider told me we don’t even know the percentage of pipeline that has been properly welded.

The second thing that troubles me is that while all this is going on the figures show that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people are going to lose their homes due to flooding. Why aren’t we having a conference about what we are going to do about that? We are all so busy blaming each other about the causes of all this (and we don’t really know) and trading carbon credits that we take our eye off the real problem: coping with global warming’s effect on mankind. Kyoto produced a system where we would reduce temperatures by half a degree centigrade for a cost that could have given the whole world clean drinking water. This next committee of ineffective self-righteousness looks set to be even worse.