Political Hot Air, part 1

I once heard that politicians get into politics to help themselves, not other people. Whilst on the face of it this seems odd, as politics is all about people, if you think about this for maybe 30 seconds it pretty much explains everything politicians say or do (ahem, moat maintenance). This also explains the saga that is climate change policy, which has been running for the last twenty years or so.

This is a tale of a big country (the US), a big problem (the amount of c.r.a.p. said country was/is belching into the atmosphere), and big greedy business (I’m feeling mean so I’ll pick on ExxonMobil, or as we know them in the UK, Esso). In 1992, at a big piss-up in Rio (sorry, I mean Summit) (told you I was feeling mean), various individuals with some semblance of authority in the countries they respectively represented agreed that Something Needed To Be Done About Climate Change. This was over a decade after the original scientific evidence, which first suggested climate change was occurring, was published. Needless to say, in between glasses of taxpayer-funded wine, the politicians at Rio realised that they needed to look like they were doing something about this phenomenon that the scientific community was increasingly getting its knickers in a twist over. After Rio, everyone went home and apparently it was one heck of a party over there because they all forgot about that thing they agreed to do for the next 5 years. In 1997, however, the hangover finally wore off and most of the known world agreed to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which committed its signatories to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 5% below 1990 levels by 2012.

Then, in 2001, lead by the idiot king of piss-ups, Bush, the US decided to withdraw its support of the Kyoto Protocol. They were rapidly followed in 2002 by Australia. At the time, the US was one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, and the Australian Prime Minister John Howard rightly said he wasn’t going to bother with greenhouse gases unless the US, and developing countries such as India and China, started bothering with them too, as there was no point. One obvious problem here is that rich countries, which (should) have sound infrastructure, lots of research and development, access to new technology and pots and pots of money, are the original cause of climate change. It was our industrial revolutions, and our addiction to all things hydrocarbon since then, that has resulted in such a large amount of choking gas floating about above our heads. Should the wealthy west turn around to the rest of the world, which we have mostly pillaged and colonised and messed up anyway, and deny them the chance to build their economies and make money in the same way that we made ours by asking them to cut back on their emissions to the same extent that we would cut back ours?

One company that grows fatter by the day living off the west’s oil addiction is ExxonMobil, or Esso. Fair enough, there are a lot of oil companies who make a mint out of this habit of ours, but Esso is a particularly fiendish culprit as they are, to put it politely, a bunch of climate change-denying greedy ignorant eejit scumbags. Here’s an interesting fact for you: ExxonMobil donated the tidy sum of $1,086,080 to the Republican party at the start of Dubya’s first election campaign. Here’s another interesting fact: up until recently, ExxonMobil dismissed the science behind climate change as a load of hot air (it would seem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report has now persuaded them otherwise). It is well known that ExxonMobil actively lobbied Bush to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol as soon as he was elected president. Just think what little men in white lab coats could have achieved in if ExxonMobil had spent half as much time, energy and money funding research into renewable energy sources and energy efficiency as they did denying that climate change existed.

The problem with global warming is that it is global. Up until recently, every miserable little country on earth has carried on as if it were an island; as if what went on at home didn’t have the slightest effect on the world outside. That is not to say that some, such as our own very very very eager Mr Ed Miliband, are not trying to boss around both folk residing in our green and pleasant land and folk living in....other places when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. Stay tuned next week for Part 2 of Political Hot Air....

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