Climate Change - The Shakedown Plan
The climate of the climate change debate is changing | Myles Allen | Environment | guardian.co.uk
The climate may have changed this week. Not the physical climate, but the climate of the climate change debate. Tuesday marked the publication of a series of papers examining the factors behind extreme weather events in 2011. Nothing remarkable about that, you might think, except, if all goes well, this will be the first of a regular, annual assessment quantifying how external drivers of climate contribute to damaging weather.
This week also saw a workshop in Oxford for climate change negotiators from developing countries. Again, nothing remarkable about that except, for the first time, the issue of "loss and damage" was top of the agenda. For years negotiations have been over emission reductions and sharing the costs of adaptation. Now the debate is turning to: who is going to pay for damage done?...
The only institution in the world that could deal with the cost of climate change without missing a beat is the fossil fuel industry:
And where does the fossil fuel industry get its money from? The magic money well? Or consumers?