A Bug's Life

I think for the average expert (and I mean bona fide climate scientists, not activists like GM) the sense of doom is almost choking. For years now we've been going further down a line of no return; and it is almost guaranteed that we'll continue in that direction for some years yet. We're still building more roads and more airports; we aren't so much rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic as drilling extra portholes below the waterline.

I'd be in the "party now" camp except that's an awfully convenient rationalisation and I _could_ be wrong, but as far as I can make out even in the best _possible_ case - ie, all governments worldwide immediately impose austerity measures of a similar stringency to those in place in Britain during WW2 (and manifestly such measures are possible) - we'd still face a fairly dismal outcome, albeit that we might well keep most of the species alive. In the best plausible case - say, people stop being quite so readily distracted into pointless greenwash activities like buying Priuses and biofuels - we're most likely all screwed. I think the most likely case is that global warming is halted only by atmospheric dust from the use of nuclear weapons.

So, ha, I said I wasn't going to write this up, but - reducing potential future emissions in the Third World to justify continued emissions in the First World is like trying to catch fish in a tree next to the river. In particular, we're pretty much at the point where all the readily available supply of fossil fuels is going to get dug up and used in the next few decades - arguably preventing an increase in demand at best delays that slightly. Demand needs to reduce radically so that some of that supply can actually be left in the ground (and, again, that's the bare minimum necessary to effect any meaningful change) - and for that to happen, those Westerners who were going to buy the offsets need _not to fly_ - not to reduce the Third World competition for energy so they can use it themselves.