‘Carbon dictatorship’ warning if world fails to act
Pastor Dale Morgan
‘Carbon dictatorship’ warning if world fails to act*
OneWorld UK
By Daniel Nelson
If the world fails to tackle climate change, a “carbon dictatorship”
might take over - backed by military force - to control emissions.
That was how Professor John Keane of Westminster University’s Centre for
Study of Democracy characterised the views of Australian crusader Tim
Flannery during a discussion in London this week.
Unless action was taken, Flannery foresaw “the darkest of dark ages”,
leading to the establishment of an Earth Commission for Thermostatic
Control, he said.
But Keane dismissed Flannery’s political suggestions as woolly: reduce
your carbon footprint, use your vote, act swiftly and delegate power
upwards to help combat the threat of global warming.
The two other speakers at the meeting on We, the Weather Makers - a
discussion of the implications of climate change science for political
economy and democracy, were less convinced of the need for drastic action.
“It’s a big but manageable problem,” was the middle-of-the-road
assessment by Dr Neil Strachan, senior research fellow with the Policy
Studies Institute’s Environment Group. “It will cost us a lot but we can
afford it.”
Strachan pointed out that estimates of the cost to Britain of 1-2 per
cent of its gross domestic product (£30- £60 billion) was the equivalent
of staging six Olympics or renewing the Trident nuclear missile system.
Because uncertainty surrounded the subject, he favoured sequential
decision-making to avoid massive expenditure that might turn out to be
unnecessary. The risk of this approach, he admitted, was that
irreversible climate change might occur.
Professor David Henderson, visiting professor at the Westminster
business school and former chief economist at the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development (the grouping of industrialised
countries) was more critical of the climate crusaders – not surprising,
given that he recently published a critique of corporate social
responsibility, Misguided Virtue.
Describing himself as dissenter from the recent Stern report on the
economics of climate change, which he said failed to take account of
uncertainties and lack of knowledge, overstated the probable cost of
climate change, underestimated the cost of ambitious mitigation policies
and “tilted to unwarranted alarmism”.
He also criticised governments’ reliance on the UN Inter-governmental
Panel on Climate Change, which he described as “not up to the mark,
professionally.”
“They have an endemic bias to alarmism”, he claimed, making it clear he
meant “the people who run the show”, not the 2,500 scientists who
contributed to the work of the Panel. He called for an independent
review of the Panel’s latest report.