Tell 'em what you think...

The Scottish Parliament are doing a consultation on Climate - this is a Scottish Bill ALL can take part in, because the Scottish climate does not cut off at the border...

There are two ways to respond that I can find. The Scottish Government form is a bit time consuming - www.scotland.gov.uk/consultations/environment/climatechange.asp

But World Development Movement have an editable ready prepared email here - www.wdmscotland.org.uk/campaigns/climate/consult-feb08.php

This is my response.

Dear Sir / Madam,

Please accept this e-mail as my response to the consultation on the proposals for a Scottish climate change bill.

Climate change is the greatest threat to the world's poor. The use of fossil fuels to sustain the present economic "growth" is leading the planet to oblivion. The west, in order to "grow" needs to burn more and more fossil fuels, making it richer which in turn gives it the resources to become richer still by burning even more fuel and growing again. Growth in the present sense of the word, is not relieving Global Poverty. Inequality has grown as our economy has grown. And this inequality gap is developing in Western countries as well as those countries that are being exploited and who have a fraction of the carbon footprint as we do.

If economists say that the need for growth is absolute and we know the need for C02 emissions is absolute, then we need to find technologies to delink C02 emissions from growth.

Please ensure Scotland does its share to keep the rise in global temperature below 2°C, or hundreds of millions will face drought, floods, starvation and disease.

The climate change bill must:

- reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050;
- include all aviation emissions;
- and have annual targets for reductions.
-encourage international agreement on how much further the levels of C02 can be allowed to rise (already difficult particularly as concentrations are too high)
-allocate fossil fuel emissions per person based on the world population – ie. Scottish people should be taking only their share and paying the peoples of the world who do not use their allocation real cash, through internationally agreed mechanisms. This would help shrink the gap between rich and poor and encourage the "South" to develop along a low fossil energy path.
-Not allow the false economy of nuclear power - To say that uranium is not wasteful is wrong. The mining process is wasteful - polluting - and dangerous eg. there are thousands of acres of wasted Navajo land in New Mexico because of the extraction process. Much of the energy used to mine uranium comes from oil. Extracting and refining Uranium and concentrating it are highly polluting processes. Nuclear power produces several times as much c02 than all of the renewable sources proposed and implemented at the moment.
Direct waste from nuke plants is about 1000 metric tonnes of waste per plant per yr, hardly small and the fact is it will produce hazardous emissions for thousands of years. (This does not include uranium mill tailings - 100000 metric tonnes per nuclear plant per annum).
The same safety measures employed in Windscale and Chernobyl are to be employed in the new reactors - graphite based - which burn in air - which is what happened in Chernobyl and Windscale, so recent assertions about these new technologies being near to 100% safe are not quite credible.

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