For my 200th post, hair shirts all round!

A milestone of sorts for my little blog, this being the 200th of my sproadic rantings to be granted qualified electronic immortality on the web. Now done patting myself on the back for a number that could be twice that were I more motivated, on to the latest bit of stupidity to grab my attention, the context being the latest climate change fiasco in Cancun:

In one paper Professor Kevin Anderson, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, said the only way to reduce global emissions enough, while allowing the poor nations to continue to grow, is to halt economic growth in the rich world over the next twenty years. [emphasis mine]
This would mean a drastic change in lifestyles for many people in countries like Britain as everyone will have to buy less ‘carbon intensive’ goods and services such as long haul flights and fuel hungry cars. [snip]
This could mean a limit on electricity so people are forced to turn the heating down, turn off the lights and replace old electrical goods like huge fridges with more efficient models. Food that has travelled from abroad may be limited and goods that require a lot of energy to manufacture.

If these people feel so strongly about all of this, they can feel free to cut off their electricity and walk everywhere. Bicycles you say? Those take a lot of energy to produce... Complete cluelessness, leaving out the fact that their Global Warming hysteria has been pretty thoroughly debunked leading into this wasteful, hypocritical, and self-deluding winter getaway in sunny Mexico.

Economic growth in the developed world is the only hope for this planet, as only the advanced technologies can support the booming populations of the "poor" countries and, more importantly, clean everything up so that we don't poison ourselves. That is the only real threat we pose to the environment, and a concentration on ways to develop our tech to get off of fossil fuels to BETTER energy sources (I'm looking at you, wind and biofuels!) might be a worthwhile expenditure of all of this hot air. Of course Talk - Action = Zero so we need money in research that actually produces something other than soundbites.

I encourage you to read the article I linked to; the comments are particularly interesting, being almost exclusively (as of this writing) dismissive of the tripe this conference is producing. The "experts" keep selling, but less and less people are buying it.