A HISTORY OF THE POLITICS OF GLOBAL WARMING - LESSONS FROM THE PAST

This article explains how the leaders of our Western democracies, many of them conservatives, decided to push forward the agenda of the global warming hypothesis and the need to reduce CO2 emissions. What appears to have happened is that little or no consideration was given to the huge cost of doing so. It was only when these costs were calculated that our leaders realised that they had opened a massive can of worms, one that they were now incapable of dealing with. It is a sobering look at the recent history and there is a very valuable lesson to be learnt by future politicians, which is that you must be very certain of all the implications before supporting what may superficially seem like a popular and uncontroversial cause.

There is a parallel here with the decision of the UK government to join the Common Market (now the European Union) back in 1972. That also seemed like a good decision at the time. Now years later we realise that what we were told we had signed up to was very different to the reality. If our political leaders had waited a while longer instead of rushing into signing up, they would have been able to see the pitfalls and so avoid them by only agreeing to things that were of direct benefit to the UK. But the problem is that political leaders want to make grand gestures. They are easily seduced by a "quick fix". Much of this behaviour is a result of the short time between elections during which they want to make their mark, usually at our expense later.