RIO+20, de rituele eredienst van de duurzaamheidskerk, ligt nu al weer enige tijd achter ons. Wat heeft die top nu opgeleverd?

In de Britse 'Telegraph' beantwoordt Christopher Booker deze vraag.

The great global warming scare has long been dying on its feet, but that sad fiasco of a conference in Rio last week saw it finally dead and buried. “It’s pathetic, it’s appalling,” wailed a spokesman for WWF, one of the thousands of green activists who flew to Rio, many at taxpayers’ expense, to see the last rites read over their lost dream. Their cause has even been abandoned by one of its most outspoken champions, the green guru James Lovelock of “Gaia” fame, who now admits that the warming scare was all a tragic mistake, and that talk of “sustainable development” is just “meaningless drivel”.

But the “epic failure” of Rio, as Friends of the Earth called it, is an apt cue to recall how this leaves Britain as the only country in the world committed by law to cut its emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent in less than 40 years. The Climate Change Act, on the Government’s own figures, faces us with a bill of up to £18 billion every year until 2050, making it by far the most costly law ever passed by Parliament.

More important still, however, this raises the question: how do all those MPs who voted almost unanimously for this target (only three voted against it) think we can meet this obligation without closing down virtually our entire economy?

Booker heeft zijn lezers uitgenodigd om deze vraag voor te leggen aan 'hun' MP's. Voor zover er al antwoorden kwamen, waren deze ontluisterend. 

Not one of the 47 MPs who answered showed the faintest understanding of the question. Many simply relied on a form letter supplied by the Department of Energy and Climate Change, starting with the sentence: “Decarbonisation does not mean de-industrialisation.” The more honest MPs sent on DECC’s letter, others used cut-and-paste to pretend that this reply was all their own work. ...

They live in a bubble of make-believe which doesn’t touch reality at any point. Yet these are the people who passed the most potentially damaging law in our history – in the name of a delusion which, in Rio last week, died the death.

Somewhere along the way, if our country is to survive, that Climate Change Act will have be thrown into the dustbin of history. But judging by their letters, these MPs will be the very last people to realise it. As the man from WWF said, “It’s pathetic, it’s appalling.” One couldn’t put it better.

Lees verder hier.

Onder de titel, 'The Rio future we avoided', schreef Peter Foster in de Canadese 'Financial Post' weer eens een 'van-dik-hout-zaagt-men-planken' commentaar:

The “failure” of Rio+20 is a cause for celebration, even if you can’t afford the champagne and foie gras that ecocrats served themselves as their hopes for “Sustainia” retreated into the policy fog. A mostly “B” list of government leaders (No Barack Obama. No David Cameron. No Stephen Harper. No Angela Merkel) was set to adopt a pablum-filled 283-point “vision” on Friday that was finalized before they arrived.

“[N]othing less than a disaster for the planet,” declared Nnimmo Bassey, Nigerian poet and chair of Friends of the Earth International. “[A]n epic failure,” claimed Kumi Naidoo, Greenpeace International executive director. ‘[A] colossal waste of time,” chimed in Jim Leape, international director-general of World Wildlife Fund.

An umbrella group of NGOs bemoaned the official text’s lack of mention of “planetary boundaries, tipping points or planetary carrying capacity,” the very shibboleth’s of radical environmentalism’s zero-sum thinking.

Lees verder hier.

Onder de titel, 'Whatever Happened To Climate Change Crisis?' heeft ook Andrew McKillop in een lang en degelijk webartikel zijn licht over de RIO+20-top laten schijnen. McKillop is verbonden geweest aan DG XVII-Energie van de Europese Commissie. Dat maakt zijn analyse extra belangrijk en pikant.

Once upon a time, climate change and global warming (supposedly the same thing), were or was as a major challenge to the planet and our civilization. It predicated a massive change of the global energy system away from dirty, dangerous and expensive fossil fuels. Everything from nuclear power and wind farms to landfill methane gas recovery, solar power plants and electric cars and bicycles was in vogue. Anything not needing oil or seeming not to, was a great emerging and breaking business opportunity, seized on not by dozens, but by hundreds of hedge funds. Most of which are gone, today.
 
In retrospect we have to ask why this mass illusion, the transition to “a new ecological society” imploded and fell off the teleprompters, off the front pages, and out of the seemingly endless TV special reports on threatened polar bears and collapsing ice cliffs. How could this all disappear so fast? ...
 
The window of opportunity for “saving the planet” from climate disaster and relaunching it as the new dominant social, political and business theme, has slid shut since 2009. All attempts at restoring the same gung ho elite fervour that preceded the vastly expensive Copenhagen conference or "summit" have failed, as the “enhanced truth” of global warming disaster has paled and shrunken, has been exposed, and replaced by other sensational news fodder for the press, media and TV to recycle and exaggerate, distort and destroy.
 
This underlines the critical challenge for attempts at saving the theme: the big lie has been exposed in public, the previously watertight new “truth” has been done down, even its high priests, most recently James Lovelock (in April 2012), have backed away from their own exaggerations. To save the theme, or in ecological parlance “recycle” it now needs a miracle, that is political leaders prepared to stick their necks out a second time: in a context of unremitting economic crisis where the surest of certitudes - like high oil prices - are under attack this is very doubtful.
 
Until December 2009, the four Global Warming leaders - - Obama, Merkel, Sarkozy and the soon-voted-out Brown - - gave regular interviews where emotive keywords of the type “catastrophe”, “saving the planet”, “our last chance” were regular fodder. Sarkozy has now also gone, and the Obama-Merkel duo are weak and unloved leaders in their home countries. Their doomster rhetoric, mindlessly gurgling soundbytes supplied by the Hansen, Lovelock, Gore trio was so extreme it was hard to believe they could be concerned about their economies going down the tube and unemployment rising to 1930s levels, but by the sheer need of trying to save their own jobs, today, their current interest in global warming disaster is now almost absolute zero.

Lees verder hier.

Maar ondertussen is het miljardenverslindende klimaatbeleid nog lang niet van de baan.

De voormalig Britse premier John Major vergeleek dat eens met regendansen – en even effectief, zo voegde hij er malicieus aan toe.