EnviroSpin Watch

Blair's political sleight of hand.....

Noting carefully the comments of Sir David King at the Exeter Conference on climate change ('Carbon burial "is climate option"', BBC Online Science/Nature News, February 3), it is increasingly obvious that Mr. Blair wants to employ fears about 'global warming' to achieve two practical political goals, namely:-

(a) the re-introduction of nuclear power, but only well after the election (it will not appear in any election manifesto), which will probably be held in May 2005; and,

(b) a shift from controlling CO₂ emissions (which, unsurprisingly, is proving more intractable than he at first imagined) to sequestering emissions geologically (already, of course, done sucessfully in Norway, and strongly supported by geologists in the UK).

Blair is all too well aware that both these options are an anathama to many 'Greens', not to mention to many environmental and left-wing correspondents in newspapers like the Gloomiad and the Indy. I believe that John Vidal, for example, is an example of a correspondent especially worried about the re-introduction of nuclear power, while Polly Toynbee has expressed the view that sequestering carbon dioxide emissions just lets people off the 'moral' hook.

By combining these two practical aims with a political imperative in the UK to be seen to be bringing independent pressure on Mr. Bush, Blair very much hopes to find his way (yet again) through the political labyrinth of the 'ever-ready-to-carp' UK left.

Philip, always examining the sinister labyrinth. Coffee.