High profile figures in the private sector and the United Nations agreed the urgency to reduce carbon emissions was such that business could not afford to wait for politicians to act.
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, said at the CNN Earth’s Frontiers debate in Cancun, Mexico, that business should be “pulling governments along.”
She said: “The difficult thing is to balance two realities. One reality is the urgency of it, which science tells us and we can see and economics has already figured out, with the political pace with which governments can move.
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/12/22/climate.change.debate/
[CO2] has a definite but minor effect (and less and less as it increases…) on global climate.. The amount of money and effort needed (to say nothing of the deleterious effect that restricting carbon use will have on our economy and lives) to effect even a minute effect on planetary temperature (a measly 0.3 degrees C by the IPCC’s own inflated estimates) is hardly proactive or sensible, Mitigate, as required, as man has done since the last ice-age. DO NOT punish or control through bureaucracy, no matter what the bureaucrats say. (Conflict of interest, anyone?) Climate science needs to concentrate on the science more and the agenda less. When they can forecast the next year’s weather, we can better trust them to predict the next century’s climate.
The Green Mafia have conscripted just about everyone they can…
Christine, you’re one clever gal. You got it in one. Business should be pulling Gubment along but it isn’t. Maybe it’s because governments ain’t that good at listening to business or maybe, just perhaps, that business is saying the exact opposite of what the politicians want to hear!
Keep pushing lass. We all know how much better you are at doing our jobs than we are!
PJB,
Predicting next years weather and predicting long term climate have little to do with each other. You assert that CO2 can have only a small effect on global climate. That maybe true, but it depends on your perspective. A 5°F global increase is not much more than a 1% increase in temp from absolute zero.
The cost being suggested by government now are quite minor in their effects on people. The new start treaty will spend much more money (maybe by an order of magnitude) on developing more hi tech nuclear weapons, which have no productive value whatsoever, and there has been no concern about that expense that I have seen from anyone. In fact several republicans insisted on these increases in order to support the treaty.
Numerous companies are involved in activity to control CO2 emissions. My favorite is Walmart that has enough economic leverage to make it profitable both for itself and suppliers, mostly by increasing efficiencies of scale. In spite of the attacks on Walmart by liberals, it is actually doing quite a bit to become carbon neutral. No government is forcing them to do anything.
Businesses are climbing over one another to be nationalized and State run! They *love* Communism!