Saturday 20 June 2009

No magic bullet on climate change

A better class of protest at the Fabian/FEPS 'six months to Copenhagen' conference on climate change this morning, with a magician outside the venue and colleagues called arriving delegates to roll up, roll up for the greatest show on earth'

They would make a (model) plane disappear - through the magic of carbon offsetting.

Abracadabra!

The cloth is swept away.

But the plane is still there!

This was a good way for Friends of the Earth to get across their argument about carbon offsetting being a dangerous distraction from climate change.

Ed Miliband seemed to enjoy the demo as he talked to the campaigners on the way in to make his keynote speech, which he is making now, saying that the central challenge is how to get an international deal which matches the science, which moves the poltiics so that it can catch up as far as possible with the demands of the science.

UPDATE: 11.30am

Good humoured protest gets a hearing - or respectful disagreement at least.

"It won't be popular with some - including with the magician outside, you may have seen, that was very clever. But we do have to see the global carbon market as part of this"

"It is not to say that the global carbon market on its own is enough, but we would be crazy not to use it too", says Ed Miliband.

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