Wrong priorities

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Last week I highlighted David Strong's piece in Building Services Journal on renaming the building services engineer, which provoked lively debate. The same edition also has a thought-provoking letter from chartered environmentalist Bruce Latimer. It's probably an argument that's been highlighted many times before but Bruce puts it clearly and succinctly: that in calling for lifestyle changes amongst individuals/businesses we will create "savings in theory only".

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is based on oil production, so if we save energy over here in the UK the same oil is more than likely to be swallowed up by someone else in the world, says Bruce. Our governments are obsessed with the "combustion" use of oil, when they should be looking at extraction and production. So our drive to produce carbon neutral housing is worthy but in the end ineffectual. He calculates that we could save less than 0.2% of annual worldwide CO2 by producing zero carbon houses (still seems a reasonable amount to me) but this saving would be "absorbed by increases in usage in China and elsewhere".

This argument seems a lot more nuanced that the usual "what can we do when China and India are going to grow by x amount" line. It's a line that I'm sure will be voiced more and more as the climate change debate evolves.

Comments

[Matthew]

Well what can I say?

YOU CAN'T REDUCE CO2 EMISSIONS.

Full stop.

If you believe the current focus on CO2 is anything more than a way of reducing our reliance on the Middle East, and preventing the economic development of developing coutnries, then quite frankly you haven't been paying attention.

Sorry to bang on but I've had enough - the march on Saturday, Gore's speech on Monday, emails flying around today "Get US Japan Canada to agree at Bali!".

Utter Nonsense.