Two contrasting climate views -- an introduction

European Union seeks to keep its leadership role on cutting carbon emissions:

E.U. Seeks to Regain Influence on Response to Climate Change

E.U. officials are looking to use every avenue to work with Brazil, South Africa, India and China — the so-called Basic countries — on climate mitigation.

Away from the sound-bite diplomacy, those countries are eager to draw on European experience in developing a low-carbon economy, administering emissions quotas and carbon trading.

Insiders say the E.U. will seek to use informal bodies like the Major Economies Forum and the Group of 20 to make progress in fighting climate change because the unwieldy U.N. framework can too easily be blocked by a handful of obstructionist states.

But there's more, and I'm going to wait on that. The contrasting view:

Two cheers for China's climate wall (by the effervescent Bjorn Lomborg)

"In short, China is aggressively protecting the economic growth that is transforming the lives of its citizens, instead of spending a fortune
battling a problem that is unlikely to affect it negatively until next century. Little wonder, then, that Ed Miliband, Britain’s secretary for energy and climate change, found ‘impossible resistance’ from China to a global carbon mitigation deal.

Trying to force China into line would be impractical and foolhardy. The inescapable but inconvenient truth is that the response to global warming that we have single-mindedly pursued for nearly 20 years — since the leaders of rich countries first vowed to cut carbon — is simply not going to work."

It is time to recognise the impracticality of trying to force developing countries to agree to make fossil fuel ever more expensive. Instead, we need to make a greater effort to produce cheaper, more widely-used green energy. And to do this, we must dramatically increase the amount of money we spend on research and development.

A global deal in which countries committed to spending 0.2% of GDP to develop non-carbon-emitting energy technologies would increase current spending 50-fold, and it would still be many times cheaper than a global carbon deal. It would also ensure that richer nations pay more, taking much of the political heat out of the debate."

More on this later, too, with regard to the role of nuclear power.