I received this on Friday:
David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband have signed a joint statement about tackling climate change. In a public agreement they have committed to working together across party lines to tackle climate change. This is an important step forward as we prepare for the UN Climate Change talks in Paris later this year. They have jointly pledged to:
- seek a fair, strong, legally binding, global climate deal which limits temperature rises to below 2°C
- work together, across party lines, to agree carbon budgets in accordance with the Climate Change Act
- accelerate the transition to a competitive, energy efficient low carbon economy and to end the use of unabated coal for power generation.
Their pledge follows a short video for Valentine’s Day – you can watch it here, but, beware, it's more about celebrities celebrating themselves than climate change. I confess that I thought the story might be an early April Fool, but it seems not. Cue much excitement all round, except from the Greens whose leader commented:
No doubt these warm words will be treated with some suspicion by many. In the Tories, Labour and the Lib Dems we have three parties who have been in power in recent years and failed to go anywhere near far enough in the fight against runaway climate change. ... We will work hard to ensure that this agreement is maintained in letter and in spirit, and that decisions and policies are based on evidence and realism - particularly about the little developed technology of carbon capture and storage.
Well, I am part of that 'suspicion', as surely some caution is warranted; just examine those verbs for a start: "seek", "work ... to agree", "accelerate". And what about the timescale, the KPIs, ... . What, indeed.
Meanwhile, as I write this on a windless, murky day, 42% of our electricity is coming from coal. And how much of that is abated (ie, captured)? Well, you know the answer to that as well as I do.
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