Kevin Myers: So have your luxury love-in, but spare us the Bali humbug

Opinion

Friday, December 07, 2007

Rio. Kyoto. Bali. That's environmental conferences for you. They always occur in sunlit places ending in vowels, and with a consonantal component of no more than 50%.

They're never in vowel-light locations like Nitvinggen or Bblarrgh or Quivdansk, where summer lasts a few hours some time in June, and where the locals spend their long winters rummaging through their clothing of animal pelts, popping lice with gnarled, nutshell fingernails, and musing vowellessly.

For, there is almost a defined UN Green Meridian, where conferences To Save The World must always be held; and where there are not miles of beaches, and galaxies of near-naked lovelies, each one sporting a tiny Ronnie Coleman beneath her wispy thong as she plays beach volley- ball, then there are either some of the greatest palaces in the world, or the most wonderful tropical islands.

An entire vocabulary has come into existence since the first great UN conference on climate change in Rio, an international dialect of carbon footprints, food-miles, greenhouse emissions and carbon-trading, of which almost everyone in the world - apart from me - seems to be master.

Ask just about anyone what the purpose of the Kyoto Treaty was, and they will - with exultant piety - tell you it was to cut the emission of greenhouse gases, and that horrible George Bush was a very bad man for refusing to sign the accord. Actually, not so.

The opposite was the truth. Kyoto was not about cutting the emission of greenhouse gases, but reducing the rate of growth in emissions.

Which meant, of course, that the actual levels of CO2, which had done so much damage to the world, were not being reduced.

And George Bush, being American and an heir to George Washington and his apple tree, on this occasion anyway, felt unable to tell a lie by signing up to a deal he could not possibly honour.

We, on the other hand, felt perfectly free to tell a lie by signing up to a treaty we had absolutely no intention of honouring, just as we also felt we could then piously excoriate President Bush for his honesty.

I accept that global warming is under way, and that it is probably caused by nefarious man-made activities, such as sex before marriage, singing Christmas carols out of season, and pub darts.

But nothing that mankind is currently doing is going to actually reduce overall CO2 levels, whether or not the UN pays its delegates to gather in the Barents seaport of Grimgrbrivosk, distinguished by its mountain of festering walrus carcasses (unlikely), or the Pacific resort of Edenia Mamalia, whose miles of golden beaches are festooned with tanned, supple buttocks and sturdy brown nipples (next time). Now, UN delegates are human. They want to enjoy themselves like the rest of us, and they're able to do so at the expense of the taxpayers of the world.

That's fine. And I don't even mind that their air-trips to Bali will generate 100,000 tons of extra CO2, or that 90 delegates from the EU are attending, even though they will have no official role, since every member country is already sending armies of delegates to compare carbon-footprints and nipple-counts.

No, what I care about is the moral smog of humbug that gathers downwind of such gatherings.

Over the next few days, we'll hear the sanctimonious clucking from Bali of various politicians and environmental journalists, all repeating the same message.

They could all have gone online and learnt and said the same things, at no cost to the environment, or to the taxpayers. But simple communication of opinions or of fact is not the primary purpose of conferences such as Bali.

They are religious congresses, like Vatican II, where the pious and zealous can commune, and listen to their various bishops, like Al Gore, prate and preach.

Never mind that Al Gore's home emits 40 times more carbon dioxide than the average American home. Consistency, either intellectual or moral, is not the underlying requirement of any religion.

Did not the medieval faithful obediently attend to sermons on the virtues of poverty from one bejewelled Medici pope after another? Did they not remain loyal to the one true religion after the Medicis returned to their courts of plump catemites and voluptuous harlots who could conjure warm liquids from the cold depths of a marble catafalque?

What is really unbearable about the entire eco-piety movement is the systematic denial of central truths. Throughout the entire history of the environmentalism, carbon dioxide emissions have continued to rise, to possibly fatal levels for the world.

If the Alps are melting, as they are said to be, then surely action is needed urgently. Yet there is no serious proposal to drive down existing levels of carbon dioxide, rapidly and soon, simply because to do so would cause a global economic collapse.

Moreover, we know, we just know, that the Chinese and the Indians and the Brazilians are determined to make themselves into major world powers.

They are not going to sacrifice their certain futures for the possibly worthless little green gods of environmentalism. For what if global warming is caused by the sun, and not us?

No matter. See you at Edenia Mamalia, next time.