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!

Incidentally, regarding Mike T's point about carbon footprint and carbon shadow, I have to confess that although I have made some efforts to reduce my footprint, my shadow remains vanishingly small: I can't even get the rest of my family to stop using cars for short journeys around town!
I am surprised the 2% - or often 1% - fallacy is still being repeated. Everybody can put themselves in a 1% group - by definition there will be 100 in the world - and say that their contribution to climate change is close to zero and therefore they do not need to do anything.

As to the developing nations using fossil fuel, isn't one of the major agreements of the recent COPs that we help them to the tune of $100 billion per year so that they can to an extent bypass fossil fuel usage and go straight to renewables. A lot of those saying we need to let them use fossil fuels as that is how we became rich actually mean "don't limit them as that would mean limiting me".

From Damian's book: A lot of cynicism is actually apathy dressed up as wisdom.