Following the debate on climate and the environment has its highs and lows. Some of the argument is of the highest standand and the scientists that can explain the complexities of climate change should be admired, even if you don't always agree with their conclusions. In the wider debate, especially amongst politicians, the debate isn't so good. Often it just repeats dreary platitudes.
Every scientist, and indeed every generation of homo sapien, has know that climate changes and can changed rapidly. It has and it always will.
There isn't alot of debate about this statement. So preventing climate change, doesn't make alot of sense, adapting to climate and making the best of it does.
We are all looking for a better environment and the less we pollute and care for the environment, the better off we will be and the better off we will feel. If climate always changes, then caring for the environment needs to be our first goal. The question might be: How can we live in a finite world, at the standards of living we desire and intervene as little as possible on what are otherwise natural processes beyond our control?. For that reason reducing our footprints in whatever form you wish to desribe them,is a good thing and if renewable energy is a better way to sustain our lifestyles, we should then do it.
Recently with emissions trading schemes being debated around the world, the argument about carbon dioxide's role in climate change has again arisen. While many scientists don't want that debate to continue, it should. The link betwen climate change, in this instance a warming earth, and carbon dioxide is a fundamental assumption behind the introduction of emission trading schemes. If that linkage is wrong, then the need for an emissions trading scheme to prevent global warming, falls away. We all know that the intriduction of trading schemes will fundamentally alter whole industries, the way we live and ultimately the way we consume. We need to keep testing that assumption if we have any doubt about it.
This author has read the scientific evidence for and against carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases being causes for global warming. It does seem that carbon dioxide does not initiate global warming. There are too many periods in the world's history when carbon dioxide was lower and the world warmed and cooled. The best scientific argument suggests that carbon dioxide might increase the pace or intensity (two separate concepts) of globle warming. For many, that possibility is enough to make the changes governments are proposing.
We do need to change the way we live, not because the climate is changing, but because we are wasteful and the world is finite. We need to put much less emphasis in our thinking on climate and a lot more thinking on how we improve our environment. The two spheres, climate and environment overlap but they are not the same. Many of the things we are doing to help prevent changing climate, we should be doing for our environment any way. That means renewable energy not to reduce carbon dioxide but to have cleaner air and reduce dependence on oil. It means reducing waste and recycling to save landfill. It means greener buildings to save energy. Whether the climate is changing or not, given that resources are finite we should do it anyway.
The emissions trading schemes may well be trading on the wrong premise. Governments should think more in terms of the environment and its resources, and less in terms of climmate. Trading schemes are not the way to present or solve the issues surrounding our environment. Legislation and taxation are and if we want a better environment, then we need to be accepting of that approach. Trading schemes, if carbon dioxide is not the culprit as some scientists believe, may be another Y2K. In that debacle, when industry made computers compliant for the year 2000, money was spent and wasted on a circumstance that never existed.
