Blog

21 april 2012, will they back down ?

I've long held that reducing greenhouse gas emissions (or coe two as the kids call it) may well be the right thing to do, but we shouldn't pretend it would be cheap, wouldn't work against economic growth, and would not involve drastic change in our western lifestyle. The best illustration of the latter is air travel, which for my grandparents was a once in a decade expense, for my parents biannual at most, but between me and my two siblings never a month goes by when one of us isn't airborne, often at a cost of less than a train. The eu has long tried to lead the world on changing the pricing of coe two (5 january 2012), but its efforts have seemed doomed since the new world order made its debut at copenhagen (a great entry, of 28 november 2010), which failed to deliver a mandatory global framework. This means europe runs the real risk of business simply shifting outside its borders to avoid higher costs; not a policy to be adopted lightly in hard economic times. Yet, it is still going on planes, which have now been brought within the groundbreaking emissions trading scheme (20 july 2011), adding perhaps two euros cost to a flight. Airlines are not happy, both european ones and others, the chinese threatening to cancel billions worth of airbus orders. Europe though is doing the right thing, as was recently recognised by five nobel economic laureates, who correctly diagnosed the political problem as starting in washington, where far from obama's election representing "the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal", things carried on much as they did under george bush the climate change denier. "Because emissions are not priced" they wrote "the world is wastefully using up a scarce resource, the earth's ability to safely absorb greenhouse gas emissions". Good economics, good policy, good for the long-term and those that come after us; bad short-term politics. Let's see what wins out.