CO2, Brussels, Washington and Kyoto

Well, it has been an exiting time for the global climate change debate recently. The EU car makers announced that they are not going to be able to meet the CO2 limits they agreed with the European Commission for 2008, never mind the not yet agreed, but much tougher limits proposed by the Commission for 2012. Soon after this ‘uncheerful’, but unsurprising news, it was announced in Washington that the Bush administration is expected to abandon plans to include SUVs in a revised CAFÉ regime. This is to protect the embattled Big 3 automakers who have much to lose from such a change in regulation; much more than their Japanese competitors, in fact. The Big 3 are also still fighting the proposals by the California Air Resources Board in Sacramento to regulate on CO2, although a similar regime in Canada has already been accepted, albeit reluctantly. Finally, in the UK, the House of Lords select committee on economic affairs published a report entitled The Economics of Climate Change, in which it is suggested that the science underlying the Kyoto Protocol may have erred on the side of the negative implications of global warming. The report suggests the science has been somewhat biased for political reasons and that the possible positive results of climate change have been underplayed. This is a significant move as it puts their lordships in the same camp as the self-styled, and much reviled, ‘sceptical environmentalist’, Bjørn Lomborg. The Danish academic may find himself in the mainstream yet