October 2009 printable subscriber newsletter

Ecologist

28th September, 2009

In this month's newsletter we take an in-depth look at work-time reduction, analyse whether cows could help stop climate change, ask if the Church could do more to tackle global warming, and look at both sides of the debate over whether we can still trust the FSC. To download, log in and scroll to the bottom of the page...

I’m sure I wasn’t the only one to pick up a paper on Tuesday 21st September and read the headline ‘Airlines vow to Halve Emissions by 2050’ with some shock. Really? I hadn’t been aware the airlines even had the technology to accomplish such a feat, let alone the confidence to publicly commit themselves to such a goal.

As I read the article, hopeful that it might contain some commitment by the aviation industry to fully integrate itself with any post-Copenhagen climate agreement, my heart sank.

What I read instead was that the aviation industry wanted to opt out of the EU Emissions Trading System (still, for all its faults, the only fully-functioning carbon market in the world) and instead have access to what BA chief executive Willie Walsh describes as a ‘global trading system’.

No such thing currently exists, and won’t do for a good few years, even should it be agreed at Copenhagen. More importantly perhaps, the painstaking lessons learned from the European system (don’t give away free credits, don’t issue more credits than there are emissions, etc) will probably have to be re-learned in the global system.

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