Contradictions at Copenhagen
Posted on | December 14, 2009 | No Comments
Copenhagen 15 rumbles on, with a good Saturday out in the Danish capital being one of the 900 people arrested by the local constabulary for throwing paving stones at the stock exchange. It’s a sign of progress that in countries where cobbles have been phased out for Tarmacadam, it is infinitely harder for protesters to make a point. But let’s not go down this road!
Environmentalists, it seems, hate trade, and various brickbats have been thrown, figuratively speaking, at international trade and the transport which facilitates it. How much better it would be if we could sit at home, not go anywhere, and eat our home grown vegetables (meat being hated too). Then we would not, besides all the noxious exhalations of ruminants, have to suffer from those out of the exhausts of ships, and the resultant climate changing effects.
It is, of course, all very rural, bucolic and charming, until we consider world population growth, which doubled between 1960 and 1999, and could well double again by 2050 (if we haven’t all drowned because of sea level rises).
All these additional people, largely emerging in the less developed parts of the world – are they to stay at home and subsist on their own home-grown produce? Perhaps they are to starve, because the trade which will enable the world’s population to avoid some Malthusian catastrophe, has been banned as unsustainable, with the carbon footprints of ships being regarded as intolerable in the post-Copenhagen dispensation?
The worry is, as our politicians make ever more expansive gestures to placate the massed environmentalists in the febrile atmosphere of Copenhagen, that the long consequences of the practical decisions taken in the heat of the moment will be ignored until it is too late. It is trade, technology and transport which will support the population of this world awhile yet, if only those who would seek to denigrate its contribution remember this useful truth!
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