Looks like George Monbiot was right on this matter then:

In March EU leaders agreed to set a binding climate
change target to make biofuel – energy sources made from plant material
– account for 10 per cent of all Europe’s transport fuels by 2020.

But
the European Commission has admitted that the objective, which aims to
cut carbon dioxide emissions, may have the unintended consequence of
speeding up the destruction of tropical rainforests and peatlands in
South-East Asia – actually increasing, not reducing, global warming.

For it was George a few weeks back who pointed out that this was going to happen.

So let’s review this shall we? Yes, there is indeed a scientific consensus that anthropogenic climate change is happening and thus that something should be done. That, unfortunately, is where the consensus breaks down. What should be done? There are those on one side (think coal and oil companies) who want to make sure their own interests are not harmed and there are most certainly those at the other extreme who use the matter as a way of trying to impose their own economic and political desires. Let’s abandon capitalism and be merry peasants in the fields sort of thing.

Leaving those two nakedly self-interested groups aside, we’ve got the economists in the middle (the people who actually think about how to create incentives for people to change their behaviour) and while there is debate here (over discount rates for example, the immediacy or not of action being required etc) pretty much everyone is saying that we need either a cap and trade system or a carbon tax.

However, for either to be useful they need to be international, global, in scope. That means using the machinery of international politics. Which is where my own gloom comes from. As this EU decision over bio-fuels shows (and the US nonsense over corn derived ethanol, the EU’s stupidities on recycling etc) that political system is dysfunctional. It simply isn’t true that feeding good science and good economics into the system leads to  good policy decisions. (The EU’s Common Fisheries Policy is another example of their entire lack of ability to do the right thing on environmental matters.)

So, in short, we’re screwed.

One way out, given that the politicians are incompetent, is technological advance. Another is that we all get rich enough that we can adapt to the coming changes ( please, note, those 15 metre sea rises are pencilled in for 500 or more years in the future). Both of which require less government involvement, not more.

I realise that this is based on my own near pathological mistrust of politicians, my unwavering belief that they’re all incompetent, but the solution to me seems to be more economic growth, the only one that has a hope of actually working.