A cheap planet-cooling machine

[jdaw1]

In practice, carbon usage is not going to be sufficiently reduced.

When drafts of a last-ditch agreement began circulating on December 18th, which should have been the meeting’s final day, the ‟80% by 2050” formula was still in place. But, hours later, it vanished. By this stage, efforts to find consensus among almost 200 delegations had given way to bargaining sessions among smallish groups of countries behind closed doors. When the fruits of that back-room trading were presented to the world by Barack Obama, the numbers were conspicuous by their absence.

So too were a number of other conditions that Europeans and others would have liked, such as a date for peak emissions. ‟Why?”, a cluster of journalists asked Lars-Erik Liljelund, the Swedish government’s point man on climate, in the early hours of Saturday December 19th. Why would a pledge that applied only to rich nations, and to which all those nations seemed to agree, have vanished from the final document? After maybe ten seconds of what-can-I-say silence came the flat reply: ‟China don’t like numbers.”

This is not entirely true. The speech to the conference that morning by Wen Jiabao, the prime minister, included a lot of numbers. There had been 51% growth in China’s renewable-energy output over the three years to 2008; China had planted 20m hectares of forests between 2003 and 2008; developed countries had produced 80% of emissions over the past 200 years; and so on. The numbers that China had resisted were those that could be read in any way as commitments. It had insisted on stripping all figures, even ones that did not apply to China, out of the text that finally became the Copenhagen accord.

In their zeal to avoid being pinned down, the Chinese went further. They secured the removal of language contained in early drafts that spoke of a Copenhagen deal as a step on the road to a legally binding treaty. As the world’s largest emitter (without which any agreement is dead), China was in a strong position, and it took full advantage.

So we need to cool the planet by other means. And I think that I have devised A cheap planet-cooling machine. Comment welcomed.

[KillerB]

I've just looked outside and I think you may have chosen an inopportune time to submit this theory to the general public. Planet Cooling is probably not on the agenda this week.

[DRT]

"Let us also eliminate an different obvious plan"

Did you get a box of spare "n"s for Christmas?

[DRT]

Perhaps Uncle Tom could build a firework that would do the same job?

[jdaw1]

"Let us also eliminate an different obvious plan"

Did you get a box of spare "n"s for Christmas?

It does seem that way. Thank you fixed.