Bags of humbug

An excellent letter in today's Financial Times about the plastic bag initiative from Marks & Spencer. The "wonderful Marks and Spencer public relations", writes Malcolm Rasala, "is not the real story. Walk around the food department of any M&S store: everything is in plastic".

The idea that making people pay for carry-out bags will somehow halt global warming is intellectual nonsense. How many M&S stores were there when the last global warming happened, ending the ice age?

There are now 1.3bn Chinese starting to shop in supermarkets where once they bought from a local market. Ditto the 1bn in India. The population of the world is on course to grow 50 per cent to 9bn. Most of these will buy their orange juice in plasticised cartons. For M&S to pretend that its PR stunt will have any material effect in the real world is cynical marketing cant.

That applies just as much to Gordon Brown's plastic bag policy.

Maybe this supports the contention of Philip Stott: "I have consistently noticed that, the more organisations like the BBC and The Times appear ‘to promote’, rather than critically ‘to report’, an assumed ‘consensus’ over ‘global warming’, the more people take up the role of critics or just turn cynical."

People, he claims, are increasingly aware that politicians will be able to do virtually nothing of any significance about reducing worldwide CO2 emissions.

They witness too much hypocrisy, from carbon trading to Kyoto failures to Bali. Moreover, we are not fooled by such nonsensical tropes as ‘saving the planet’ and ‘stopping climate change’

Furthermore

people are increasingly sceptical over the idea that reducing CO2 will achieve any predictable climate outcomes, and they are now far more willing to focus on adaptation to climate change, rather than on ill-focused, ‘Alice-in-Wonderland’ schemes for climate mitigation.

And they are fed up with repeated lecturing, he claims, which always seems to involve policies which will raise prices and taxes and constrain their lives.

Do read his whole piece.