Key, Mr Ambitous when it comes to cycleways and Job Summits, says that reducing carbon emissions from developed countries like ours by 2020 to 40% below 1990 levels, which the scientists say is mandatory if we want to avoid run-away climate change, is “too ambitious“.
Fair enough, I suppose. I’m sure the laws of nature will understand. Maybe they’ll cut us a break.
When we push the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere up and up, past 450 ppm, pushing the world’s average temperature more than 2 degrees higher, triggering a run-away effect of positive feed-backs that will see the temperature quickly race up by 4, 5, 6 degrees, melting the glaciers that feed the great rivers, turning the rainforests to tinderboxes, acidifying the oceans, leaving our croplands arid, we and all the other nations of the world will be able to call out in one voice ‘But 40% was too ambitious’ and the Earth will say ‘Fair enough, I suppose’.
Magically, the simple physics that any high school kid can understand and recreate for themselves won’t apply. The world will carry on as if nothing happened.
We will clap ourselves on the back for putting our economies ahead of our environment. Smarter than wasting all that potential wealth on something as silly as not screwing up the one planet we have to live on.
Want to save the world from ourselves? Nah, that’s too ambitious.
Especially when catastrophe is decades away. There’s money to be made for the rich right now.
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