November 2nd, 2005
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Tony Blair appeared last night to undermine more than 15 years of climate change negotiations when he signalled a shift away from a target-based approach to cutting greenhouse emissions. Speaking at the end of the first day of a summit in London of environment and energy ministers, the prime minister said that legally binding targets to reduce pollution made people “very nervous and very worried”.
He said when the Kyoto protocol expires in 2012, the world would need a more sensitive framework for tackling global warming. “People fear some external force is going to impose some internal target on you … to restrict your economic growth,” he said. “I think in the world after 2012 we need to find a better, more sensitive set of mechanisms to deal with this problem.” His words come in the build-up to UN talks in Montreal this month on how to combat global warming after Kyoto. “The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet this challenge,” he said.
the guardian
Now, if someone could just tell the Liberals…Short words: Kyoto dead.
Written by jay on November 2nd, 2005 with no comments.
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Jean Chretien has come out swinging at the Gomery report, saying it contains serious errors and announcing he will seek a judicial review.
cp
So this will give Dithers all the time he needs to determine what, if any, impact the Gomery report has had on the voters.
If the CPC still look pathetic, the Prime Minister of all the Canadas will say “Though I promised an election 30 days after the realease of the final report, the former Prime Minister’s actions in taking this intial report to law cannot be allowed to interfere with Canada’s need for a strong majority government.” If, on the other hand, Canadians are a mite put out about Liberals in general and don’t quite buy the idea that Martin really knw nothing at all - and Lord knows Kinsella doesn’t - then Martin will not be breaking any promises if he waits a while to call a vote.
Like he didn’t know this when he annouced the “election”.
Poor Harper is just screwed.
Written by jay on November 2nd, 2005 with no comments.
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So attention is a zero sum game and if we are creating (at an exponential rate?) more uses of attention, then we are facing a looming attention crisis.
a vc
A really good consideration of the nature of attention and the fact that there are only a limited number of channels that anyone can keep in their head at once.
My own belief is that the real opportunities in Web 2.0 are going to be for editors. People who have the time and the expertise to act as filters for all of the material out there.
At the same time, Web 2.0 adventures such as memeorandum are critical. These use code to sort and value blog posts and they will be a vital tool in an editor’s arsenal. Ultimately, though, I am inclined to think that there will be real value in editors who find and contextualize (awful word) material for particular, small (no more than 10000 subscriber audiences.
The question of how such editors will be paid is interesting. As a general rule, people who visit a website daily quickly become “ad blind”. They virtually never hit any of the ads on the page. They might read them; but they do not actually follow through.
However, if there was a seemless way of paying for the editor’s skills that might be worth something. Currently we have the kludgey and rarely used PayPal button. In fact it has to be easier than that to make a micro payment. I have a few ideas how that might work.
Written by jay on November 2nd, 2005 with 1 comment.
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When Tony Blair recognizes in print that
We need to cut greenhouse gas emissions radically but Kyoto doesn’t even stabilise them….We have to understand as well that, even if the US did sign up to Kyoto, it wouldn’t affect the huge growth in energy consumption we will see in India and China. China is building close to a new power station every week. They need economic growth to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty but want to grow sustainably. We have to find a way, as a start, to help them.
the observer
Kyoto is really all over save the shouting.
Blair - like the US, India, China and Australia - has realized that the solution - if there is one - to human induced climate change - if that actually exists - is technological rather than bureaucratic,
We need to see how the existing energy technologies we have such as wind, solar and - yes - nuclear, together with new technologies such as fuel cells and carbon capture and storage, can generate the low carbon power the world needs.
the observer
Cleaner, more efficient energy generation is a good in itself. It has the potential to make energy cheaper, more abundant and much cleaner. The illusion of change implicit in carbon trading (which, sadly, Blair still endorses) and mandated carbon reductions under threat of fines simply postpones the day when it wil make economic sense to move away from fossil fuels towards more efficient energy sources and more effective energy uses.
Remember this number: China uses seven times the energy input per unit of production as America does. Reducing that to, say three times will do much more towards the reduction of carbon emissions than virtually anything proposed in Kyoto.
Written by jay on November 2nd, 2005 with 1 comment.
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With his fulsome exoneration of Martin, Mr, Justice Gomery has holed the entire, silly, CPC election strategy beneath the waterline. While the Tories will certainly be able to crow that Chretein and his cronies raped and pillaged the federal purse, Gomery has essentially said that they did so invisible to the rest of Cabinet including Martin.
What this does is leave the CPC with its quaint anti-gay marriage plank and a loud whine that the Liberals were corrupt a decade ago. Not much to take into an election in which Martin will point to budget surpluses, cut taxes, claim to be defending health care and ask for a strong mandate to negotiate trade with the nasty Americans.
Harper will be lucky to win fifty seats.
Written by jay on November 2nd, 2005 with 4 comments.
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