The end is nigh for climate-change activists

[-:Undertaker:-]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/eart...activists.html

The end is nigh for climate-change activists

Many formerly backward countries will not sacrifice their new-found prosperity on the altar of eco-virtue

Coal is going to grow enormously over the next 50 years despite what climate activists say

Poor Paris. Less than three weeks ago, the scene of carnage; this week, the venue for saving the planet. Because of security after the Isil atrocities, the City of Light was spared a planned climate change march, but London had one on Sunday, attended by what the ever-Green BBC optimistically described as “tens of thousands”. One of the march’s leaders, the fashion designer Dame Vivienne Westwood, said: “Global warming is at a tipping point. If we go past it we can’t stop it. We are there right now.”

In this view, Dame Vivienne accords with the Prince of Wales, who predicted in Rio de Janeiro in March 2009, that there were “less than 100 months to act” to prevent “catastrophic climate change”. In other words, it’s all over by July 2017.

So there is a very real hope that the 21st UN Climate Change Conference (COP 21), which starts on Monday, will be the last. Either Prince Charles and Dame Vivienne will prevail, and COP 21 will rescue Mother Earth from destruction by agreeing worldwide legally binding carbon emission restraints; or they won’t, and then, by their own logic, it will be too late for any international conference to do anything ever again, so they might as well shut up. For those of a more sceptical cast of mind, there is a third possibility, which is that the Prince and the dressmaker will fail, no legally binding targets will be agreed, and the world will go on very much as before. I would bet His Royal Highness an enormous amount of money on this last outcome, secure in the knowledge that, if I am wrong, I will not be around to pay out, but if he is wrong, he will be.

The reason that there will not be a legally binding agreement (or at least not a genuinely enforceable one) is the growth of something which the Left has always called for, but doesn’t quite like when it gets it – the power of the developing world. India, for example, sees it as “carbon imperialism” for the West to deny it the fossil-fuelled industrialisation which gave us a more than 100 years’ start on the rest of the world. A great many formerly backward countries are at last getting rich and they will not sacrifice their new prosperity on the altar of eco-virtue. Nearly seven years ago, at COP 15 in Copenhagen, Barack Obama, bearing his Nobel Prize and at the height of his moral prestige, pleaded with them, to no avail. What will make them listen to him now, in the twilight of his presidency?

Yes the end of the world is nigh if you believe in global warming, although those sceptical of it are intensely relaxed about it just as we were at the last utterly pointless global warming conference when the genius Gordon Brown told us that we had a mere 50 days to save the world.

Interestingly, a poll the other day for Sky News shows disbelief in global warming among Britons climbing from a small 13% in 2013 to 24% today. I have to say that on yet another argument, it is reassuring to see public opinion shifting although on this i'm still in the minority.

India, China and other countries anywho aren't going to pay any attention - and nor should they - to our misguided leaders and they're going to keep burning coal and gas which is lifting their people out of the grinding poverty they've suffered for the last 60 to 100 years. In short, it's all just one big PR campaign for the politicians to get together and a forum for where corrupt African despots like Robert Mugabe can demand yet more money from western powers in 'aid' to 'tackle climate change' when the reality is that they can't grow crops due to gross crop and irrigation mismanagement, nothing to do with sun or burning coal.

Anyway there you go. This is just a counter narrative to one the BBC is playing atm which is that humanity is about to be saved from itself.

[Empired]

Regardless of whether global warming exists or not (I still strongly believe it does but that's not what I'm talking about here), what happens when we run out of fossil fuels? I genuinely want to know the answer: what's the plan for when we use them all up?
Although nuclear fuel is popular I doubt countries would be prepared to go entirely nuclear on the grounds of there being nowhere sensible to put waste.

So what next?

[-:Undertaker:-]

Regardless of whether global warming exists or not (I still strongly believe it does but that's not what I'm talking about here), what happens when we run out of fossil fuels? I genuinely want to know the answer: what's the plan for when we use them all up?
Although nuclear fuel is popular I doubt countries would be prepared to go entirely nuclear on the grounds of there being nowhere sensible to put waste.

So what next?

We're not going to run out of fossil fuels for centuries so there's nothing really to worry about is the answer tbh.

Great Britain alone I once read is sitting on 350 years worth of coal reserves (that we can get to) and we're finding new ways to extract oil from deeper wells that in the past we couldn't get to or which were uneconomical. Then there's the new methods of tar sands in Canada as well as the shale gas revolution that has taken place in America already and which is coming here. Even today we're still discovering vast new oil and coal reserves and there's still vast wildernesses such as Siberia in Russia which are suspected to be full of resources that are just waiting to be utilised.