welcome to No Targets
Examining the alternatives to a targets based response to environmental problems in general, and climate change in particular.
News
Stories which reveal the fate of environmental limits when they become inconvenient.
November 2011
Is it time to forget the 2 degree target?
The summits in Copenhagen and Cancun continued what a number of observers believe is a forlorn quest to get the major polluting countries to agree a legally binding greenhouse gas emission reduction deal.
‘We’ve been doing the same kind of approach for 20 years now, and it’s going nowhere’, explains Professor Scott Barrett, from the Earth Institute at Columbia University.
Simply put, the major polluting countries like the US, Russia and China are unwilling to commit to making the changes to their industries and economies that would be necessary to make a real difference to climate change.
More
Publications
The Hartwell Paper (2009)
"Climate policy, as it has been understood and practised by many governments of the world under the Kyoto Protocol approach, has failed to produce any discernable real world reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases in fifteen years...The crash of 2009 presents an immense opportunity to set climate policy free to fly at last. The principal motivation and purpose of this Paper is to explain and to advance this opportunity. To do so involves understanding and accepting a startling proposition. It is now plain that it is not possible to have a 'climate policy' that has emissions reductions as the all encompassing goal."
For more on this report and other relevant publications click here
"Climate policy, as it has been understood and practised by many governments of the world under the Kyoto Protocol approach, has failed to produce any discernable real world reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases in fifteen years...The crash of 2009 presents an immense opportunity to set climate policy free to fly at last. The principal motivation and purpose of this Paper is to explain and to advance this opportunity. To do so involves understanding and accepting a startling proposition. It is now plain that it is not possible to have a 'climate policy' that has emissions reductions as the all encompassing goal."
For more on this report and other relevant publications click here
What's wrong with environmental targets?
Environmental targets are rarely about preventing danger, and more about allowing risks to be taken. If it is decided there is no safe limit, all interference with the climate/release of radioactive material/pollution of waterways is dangerous, then the polluting activity would have to stop. Setting a yet to be reached dangerous limit allows business to carry on as usual. Continued
An interesting video on the failure of climate targets
