Science and action on climate change diverging: UK

[deadparrot]

LONDON (Reuters) - The gap between what countries are doing to address climate change and what scientists say they should be doing is widening, Britain's Environment Minister David Miliband, said on Friday.

"I think there's a widening gap between where we are now and where the scientists say we ought to be," he told reporters.

The growing gap was not due to a slowing of political action but to increasingly dire warnings delivered by science, he said.

"The science has been consolidated in the past year in dramatic and stark terms," he said, without elaborating.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/environment_climate_britain_dc

[muriel_volestrangler]

1. True, but it applies to his own government too

Rather than working for taxes of aviation fuel, they OKed a new terminal at Heathrow, and are contemplating a second runway at Stansted airport. In 1996, the last year before Miliband's Labour party took office, fuel tax in the UK was 77% of the pump price. By 2005, that had gone down to 66%.

Meanwhile, building standards are lax, permitting inefficient new houses and offices, while they are rarely enforced. See George Monbiot. Or:

A week ago, I would have said that if it is too late, then one factor above all others is to blame: the chokehold big business has on economic policy. By forbidding governments to intervene effectively in the market, the corporations oblige us to do nothing but stand by and watch as the planet cooks. But on Wednesday I discovered that it isn’t quite that simple. At a conference organised by the Building Research Establishment, I witnessed an extraordinary thing: companies demanding tougher regulations, and the government refusing to grant them(5).

Environmental managers from BT and John Lewis (which owns Waitrose) complained that without tighter standards that everyone has to conform to, their companies put themselves at a disadvantage if they try to go green. “All that counts”, the man from John Lewis said, “is cost, cost and cost.” If he’s buying eco-friendly lighting and his competitors aren’t, he loses. As a result, he said, “I welcome the EU’s Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, as it will force retailers to take these issues seriously.”(6) Yes, I heard the cry of the unicorn: a corporate executive, welcoming a European directive.

And from the government? Nothing. Elliot Morley, the minister for climate change, proposed to do as little as he could get away with. The officials from the Department of Trade and Industry, to a collective groan from the men in suits, insisted that the measures some of the companies wanted would be “an unwarranted intervention in the market”.

It was unspeakably frustrating. The suits had come to unveil technologies of the kind which really could save the planet. The architects Atelier Ten had designed a cooling system based on the galleries of a termite mound. By installing a concrete labyrinth in the foundations, they could keep even a large building in a hot place – like the arts centre they had built in Melbourne – at a constant temperature without air conditioning(7). The only power they needed was to drive the fans pushing the cold air upwards, using 10% of the electricity required for normal cooling systems.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/09/20/a-world-turned-upside-down/

Regulations that are needed for the good of everyone must be enforced. If Miliband can convince the business-worshipping Labour cabinet, he'll have done some real good. I won't hold my breath.