Quote Originally Posted by anthonykay View Post
I haven't read Damian's book, but is he (or anyone else) saying that the poor shouldn't be allowed to raise themselves to a decent standard of living? Surely the point is that we, the relatively rich who have produced most of the pollution, should be cutting down on our burning of fossil fuels. "Just stop oil" may be a fairly stupid slogan, but there is plenty more we could do with existing technologies to reduce our impact, e.g. better transport policies as found in many European countries. And Konstantin Kisin's point about UK's greenhouse gas emissions being only 2% of the world's, so any reductions here would have no impact, is complete b****cks: every country except USA and China could point to a similarly small percentage, so then no-one bothers to do anything!
The only way those in the developing world can increase their standard of living is to use large amounts of cheap fuel, and until we come up with a green source that is cheaper they will use coal, oil and gas to do it. As the people of China and India (and other large countries too) become richer and richer they will consume ever increasing amounts of energy, causing the UK's already small percentage of total emissions to dwindle.

Making products such as steel and cement use massive amounts of energy. If UK industries like these operated only using green power their production costs would make their products too expensive to buy. The result would be the products would be made in the developing world, using coal, and then shipped to us with further emissions.

If the 'experts' telling us to "Just stop oil" really wanted to show their 'expertise', they would be working on nuclear fusion and other forms of cheap, green, energy production, rather than waving banners and glueing themselves to motorways