Anger as UK's carbon dioxide emissions reach 10-year high

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2405123.ece

A six-million-tonne question mark was placed over Britain's climate change strategy yesterday with the release of figures showing that UK greenhouse gas emissions, which the Government has pledged to cut radically, are actually soaring.

Emissions of the principal greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, from power stations, motor vehicles and homes, amounted to 560.6 million tonnes last year, 6.4 million tonnes higher than the 2005 figure. The increase of 1.15 per cent means that Britain's emissions are now at the highest level since Labour came to power a decade ago, nearly 3 per cent above 1997.

The disclosure, which seems to be a stark illustration that Britain's climate strategy is not working, despite all the pronouncements of Tony Blair and his ministers, was greeted with concern in Whitehall and with anger and scorn by environmentalists and opposition politicians. They said the Government was clearly not on course to meet its targets of cutting CO2 by 30 per cent by 2020 and 60 per cent by the middle of the century. (It has already admitted it will not meet its long-standing target of a 20 per cent cut by 2010.)

It is especially embarrassing for the Government as only a fortnight ago it launched with much fanfare its Climate Change Bill, proposing to make future targets to cut emissions legally binding and thus - in theory - unmissable.

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a significant portion of the public routinely accepts our "elected" representatives' growing penchant for lying in our faces.

It is business as usual, as comfortable as McCain strolling through an Iraqi market wearing a bullet-proof vest declaring how "safe" he feels. Just another steaming pile of bullshit lapped up by the largely co-conspiritorial masses...

In the short term, turning the corner on the climate crisis requires us to change our own habits, driving and flying less, using less energy at home, buying local instead of global. The people must necessarily lead as the leaders for the most part are corrupt. But that would require individual sacrifice, which is off the table for many. Just as we seem to believe you can wage senseless war on the cheap, we believe we can enjoy our current western lifestyles without environmental peril.

But these assumptions do share something in common with the current crop of Western political elites - nothing could be further from the truth.