Stephen Rees's blog

I stumbled upon this report this morning – or rather Timothy Hurst’s summary of it on “Red Green and Blue”

The key assumptions are that non OECD growth continues at a rapid pace and that there is no effective international agreement to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

And as the price of oil rises so “Unconventional resources (including oil sands, extra-heavy oil, biofuels, coal-to-liquids, and gas-to-liquids) from both OPEC and non-OPEC sources are expected to become increasingly competitive”. And of course in the case of oil sands – and actually the other sources too – these sources are themselves major CO2 emitters.

It is, of course, a lot easier to project forward from existing trends than to judge how the world is going to respond to this – meaning us, the planet’s reaction is all too predictable too, and has been predicted for some time, but so far nothing very effective is being done about the threat this poses to human survival. And the press that I have been reading over the weekend seems to be obsessed with the short term political outcomes – the impact of BC’s carbon tax and whether Stephane Dion’s announcement of a proposed equivalent – are the kiss of death to Liberal political hopes. On the whole I find it very hard to be concerned about that.

I think the only real question left is how bad does it have to get before we start to change? And by “we” I mean human beings in general and the largest consumers of fossil fuels in particular. And of course this is not a particularly original thought