Brown-nosing
Jan 19th, 2008 by handolio
After lots of work and a couple of nights out, what I could really do with today is taking it easy, but something in this story about Gordon Brown’s visit to China made me choke on my toast and Marmite:
Mr Brown has also offered China £50m to help the country tackle climate change.
Hello?
I don’t meant to come over all Daily Mail – yesterday it was only the correctly-placed apostrophe in the Tax Payers’ Alliance that stopped me wanting to harm them – but I assume that he’s talking about £50 million of public funds.
Fresh from his 10-year stint as chancellor, I would have expected the prime minister to have a fairly good grasp of how this capitalism thing works. China’s emissions come principally from producing the energy necessary to fuel a massive manufacturing economy.
Wikipedia puts China about 10% ahead of the UK on GDP – 4th in the world. If you include Taiwan and Hong Kong it’s one-third larger. If you start getting clever with Purchasing Power Parity, it’s second only to the US. According to our friends at the CIA world factbook, “In 2006 China had the largest current account surplus in the world – nearly $180 billion”.
Perhaps I’m naïve, but I don’t think money is the problem here.
And another thing, I’m hereby banning the phrase “tackle climate-change”.
It’s meaningless and unquantifiable; the “pockets of resistance” of environmental reporting.
Could not agree more. Hard earned tax payers money going to a country with a large surplus? We have OAPs who really are struggling with the high energy bills in the UK. Hmmm ….
… If we’re serious about climate change then so should the other large economies of the world that depend on our trade. Giving money like this is not the answer. Bring on some home truths and hard negotiations.