With governments on all levels, corporations and traders drooling over the potential of carbon credits for which some will profit enormously without doing anything and with absolutely no benefit for the environment, you may find this tongue firmly inserted in cheek letter to David Miliband, Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs from a UK pig “non-farmer” amusing. See Letter to Miliband . Thanks to Bob Carter from Australia for passing it on.
Two days before the G8 summit, China laid out a climate change plan that stresses economic growth over tough emissions standards, and warned wealthy countries not to interfere with the growth of emerging economies. “The international community should respect the rights of the developing countries and allow them enough space for development. The consequences of inhibiting their development would be far greater than not doing anything to fight climate change,” said Ma Kai, the minister of China’s key Reform and Development Commission. China is the biggest greenhouse gas emitter after the United States.
Meanwhile, former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt called for an end to the “hysteria” over global warming in the lead-up to the summit. The topic is “hysterical, overheated, and that is especially because of the media,” Schmidt told Germany’s Bild daily. There has always been climate change on earth, Schmidt said. “We’ve had warm- and ice-ages for hundreds of thousands of years,” he said, and added that the reasons behind the multiple climate changes have been “inadequately researched for the time being.” To assume that global climate change can be altered by any plans made at the Heiligendamm summit is “idiotic,” he said. See full story here.
By Tom Strode, Baptist Press
A coalition of evangelical Christians from various fields is preparing public policy recommendations designed not only to foster stewardship of the environment but to promote economic progress. The Cornwall Alliance, formerly known as the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, maintained its role as an alternative to the Evangelical Climate Initiative.
The ECI, a coalition of more than 100 evangelical leaders, contends human beings are the main cause of global warming, which it says will negatively impact poor people the most. The ECI, which issued a statement in February 2006, has endorsed legislation to decrease carbon dioxide emissions in an effort to combat climate change. Leaders of the Cornwall Alliance continued to assert that the cause of global warming is uncertain. They also expressed concern about the effects that policies proposed by those who believe in human-induced climate change would have on the poor. In July, they released a document that was partly a response to ECI’s statement and was signed by more than 110 evangelicals.
“The science is nowhere near settled on the issue of global warming,” said Roy Spencer, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, at a May 2 news conference “The only thing that’s settled about global warming ... is it has warmed in the last 100 to 150 years. See full story here