so what time's lunch?

Climate talks at the United Nations.

From the bbc:

"That's the question you're not allowed to ask," the delegate wryly ticked me off as we chatted in the Nairobi sunshine.

It was the question I had been asking all the way through the UN climate talks - what is any of this actually doing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions?

You would think it would be the one question on everybody's lips at conferences designed to formulate the definitive international response to climate change.

The reality is that climate change has become an incredibly complex issue.

Clearly there is no appetite in any government for doing things the straightforward way - mandating clean energy, banning coal-fired electricity generation, clearing city centres of cars, forcing builders to adopt stringent energy efficiency standards.

All this, we are told, will "damage competitiveness".

How is it to be that the world’s biggest polluter, the United States will not go down in history as the country that had the most opportunity to do the most with regard to climate change, but instead choose short-term economic growth, in effect giving a two-fingered salute to the environment and the rest of the world. Bush’s Republican administration will be judged not by rhetoric, but by its ‘tax is a dirty word in this country’ domestic mission statement, a catastrophic failure of foreign policy with regard to Iraq, and its head-in-the-sand approach and refusal to adopt the Kyoto Protocol.

And all the while, incredibly, he thinks he’s doing the right thing…hey, bushy; all those graphs, if you can actually read a graph that isn't related to taxes and the rich, aren't upside down. history, unless it’s written by Karl Rove, won’t be generous to George W. Bush.