Blind spot

 “The single most important environmental problem affecting the world right now,” argues ‘sceptical environmentalist’ Bjørn Lomborg, “is indoor air pollution caused by poor people cooking and heating their homes with dung and cardboard. But the solution is not environmental - to regulate dung - but rather economic, by ensuring everybody can get rich enough to afford kerosene.” Or then again, it might be economic and environmental - by converting dung to biogas for clean cooking; or using ingenious new smokeless stoves which run on crop waste. In the long run, each works out cheaper than kerosene. And as kerosene prices spiral as subsidies are lifted and oil supplies shrink, the price differential may be wider still…

Real estate developer Bulgarian Dreams is selling luxury ‘carbon offset’ holiday apartments for the “environmentally conscious investor”. Its clients, it reckons, will sleep more soundly at night, secure in the knowledge that any carbon emitted in building the resort (which overlooks a new golf course and marina) has been dealt with. But there’s no mention of the emissions caused by the three-hour flight to Bulgaria… “The notion that flying is a selfish, anti-social activity that single-handedly threatens planetary catastrophe bears no relation to the evidence. If we took the most extreme policy option imaginable and banned all future domestic and international flights from the UK, the effect on global warming would be minuscule.” Willie Walsh, CEO of BA, in combative mood on climate change.

9 November 2006