Seasons Greetings!

Thanks for your good wishes everyone, and your on-line cards. Here's mine!

So has this been a fruitful year? First let’s celebrate the good news. Wrt my posts,

1. UK Government’s plan to privatise 650,000 acres of our forests was scrapped
2. planning permission for Nocton Dairies was refused.
3. the EU did not cut the so called ‘Pillar 2’ funding – this is the money available within the CAP to reward farmers who farm in ways that benefit wildlife and the environment.
4. European Union climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard was instrumental in delivering something from the Climate Talks in Durban.

Now the bad. After Cancun and Copenhagen last year, at Durban the world’s negotiators just kicked the can down the road once again, leaving them further than ever from achieving their stated goal of keeping average global temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — a commonly accepted threshold beyond which the planet’s climate patterns could be seriously destabilized.

Here are some observations

It is unacceptable that world leaders are still stalling on a global plan to cut emissions of carbon to curb the increase of temperatures. We witnessed in Durban wrangling and hair splitting over legal terminology, as well as bald-faced delaying tactics that threaten to derail the negotiations. The decision-makers must wake up to the fact that the lives of billions of people today and in the future depend on them to act in unison to respond to the global challenge that climate change poses (Mikhail Gorbachev, founding president of Green Cross International)

This deal is a lot better than no deal, not least because it scuppers George Osborne's push to gut domestic environmental action on the altar of international inertia. That said, we can't keep coming back to these annual talks to agree deals that fall so far short of what the science, rather than the politics, requires (Ruth Davis, Greenpeace UK chief policy advisor)

The brutal truth is that our leaders lack the political will to do what is necessary. The delay in Durban means politicians have deepened our titanic environmental overdraft  (Damian Carrington, the Guardian's head of environment)

 

 

One crumb of comfort in Durban has been the emergence of a large coalition of high ambition countries, led by the most vulnerable nations and small island states, including many in Africa. It's good that the UK and EU have aligned themselves with this coalition (Keith Allott, Head of Climate Change at WWF-UK)

There may be a period in which we begin to believe that something real was accomplished here but let me be clear: this was not enough. Not even close. This was meeting expectations lowered beyond all expectations. Rescuing defeat from the jaws of worse defeat. In the long-run, Durban will be nothing but a footnote in a narrative of missed opportunities and willful ignorance.

The youth of the world cannot and should not accept what Durban delivered. We're sleepwalking towards calamity, and the world's governments just agreed to wake up at some point down the line. (Oliver Hughes, student activist at COP17 for SustainUS)

After 20 years of negotiations, my question is when are these people going to implement effective action to justify the carbon footprint they make, flying off to exotic destinations merely to talk? (Sir Percefal )