The Environmental Shoe Horn

A quick point before I shuffle off to bed.

Climate change is such a stick thin end of the environmental debate. The ecological devastation wrought by the way we live - essentially because of the divoroce of demand from its consequences - is so much wider than carbon emissions.

No doubt dumping billions of tonnes into the atmosphere hasn't helped Mother Gaia sustain her elegant balance but the way the world has become carbon obsessed is laughable.

Need an extra flight - then offset it a little better...worried about your country's emissions - farm them off to the third world. This excellent interview by George Monbiot with the UN's leading climate change officer describes how the Clean Development Mechanism (proposed by the vastly over-inflated Al Gore) vastly ramps up the charges of cleaning up through a wad of bureaucracy that distributes the revenues to God knows where.

It's frightening and entirely expected. In the same way as PFI, ID cards and nuclear power are worldwide used as mechanisms to make sure public money goes into specifically few hands, not to mention control of these systems, so is carbon trading.

Environmentalism has been shoe horned into its area of greatest profit and so issues such as resource use and bio-diversity get slumped to the bottom of the pile.

Is this a premeditated state of affairs or the result of our collective ignorance?

I'm afraid that the one conjures the other. We had better get ready to look.