suicidal for competitiveness
British industry yesterday urged ministers to undertake a drastic revision of their plans for cuts of up to 20% in carbon dioxide emissions and warned they could be suicidal for manufacturing's competitiveness.Ω Mr. Gow creates something called "British industry" and then asks his readers to imagine that thing he created "urging ministers to undertake a drastic revision..."
The government's ambitious proposals to combat global warming on a sector by sector basis brought warnings that electricity prices could rise by up to 80% by 2010 and spell the end for coal-fired power stations that still account for 35% of British power.
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Leading industry's charge, Digby Jones, CBI director-general, said the government "is risking the sacrifice of UK jobs on the altar of green credentials", and, urging a rethink, said ministers should at least promise not to press ahead without guarantees that all EU states would be just as tough.
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The new EU scheme encourages companies out-performing their targets to sell their credits, prompting ministers to argue that London would emerge as a centre of excellence for carbon trading.
What's doing the urging there is not some vague entity draped in the Union Jack, it's a bunch of men and their camp followers. British industry will exist as long as there are men making cooking pots and selling them. There will be an economy as long as there are people eating and talking to each other.
What these men want to preserve is themselves; and their positions of power, influence, and privilege. By constantly pounding the absurd idea that their personal comfort is synonymous with the survival of the people they exploit, into the heads of the exploited, or getting toadies like Mr Gow to do it for them, they have convinced members of an animal species that has weathered every shock-and-awe campaign the terrestrial environment has seen since the inception of one-celled life, that they will not outlast a few years of social turmoil.
Mr. Jones and Mr. Gow and their well-fed brethren would like us all to believe that only technology can save us. It's hard to see it now, through all the smoke and fire, but it was our adaptability, how we used what tools we had, more than the tools themselves, that got us here.
More than brute force, more than cunning, and more than the manufacture of electrical energy, it was our ability to change with changing circumstances, to remain light on our feet. We lived through the Ice Age without the automobile.
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The beauty of Mr. Digby Jones' position is that by the time he's definitively proven to be wrong everybody will have much too much else on their minds and no one will be interested in wasting precious dwindling moments prosecuting him for his homicidal obstructionism.
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And personally I think it would be more elegant for the responsible parties in this incipient catastrophe to commit some kind of ritual suicide. Rather that than the mass murder, or at best manslaughter, they seem almost cheerfully willing to risk.
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The way it seems to be headed, London, and every other urban centre, may well become a centre of excellence for gondola makers.
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Note to Matt Drudge: "global warming" is an unfortunate word choice we're stuck with for now. Global fever would have been more accurate, metaphorically and descriptively.
