Can Barack Obama save us from hell?by Geoffrey Lean
Published: 8:24PM BST 09 Jul 2009
Telegraph.co.uk
As G8 leaders in L'Aquila wrestle with climate change, Geoffrey Lean reports on the US President's mission to prevent global catastrophe.
What is the opposite of déjà vu? Whatever it is, I experienced it yesterday in a dingy meeting room beneath London's US Embassy talking to Barack Obama's principal adviser about the chance of international agreement to combat climate change.
I had last been in that room, 18 months ago, to discuss the same issue with one of President Bush's top advisers. For an hour we fenced, as I suggested different approaches towards a deal. The response was consistent: nothing doing.
Yesterday the room was the same, the subject was the same, even the official who escorted me to the meeting was, I would swear, the same. But the conversation could not have been more different. For I was given the most bullish assessment of the prospects for an effective agreement that I have heard in years.
This was all the more surprising because Prof John Holdren – Assistant to the President for Science and Technology – is no spin doctor, but an award-laden scientist who has long been one of the United States' foremost authorities on global warming. A former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he has a lifetime's reputation riding on getting it right.
Yet he was saying that he would "bet" that the US would legislate to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by the beginning of December, making it possible to get "a degree of agreement that will surprise people" at a crucial international negotiating meeting which then opens in Copenhagen.
I – like almost everyone I have spoken to over the past months – remain sceptical. After all, as we spoke, leaders of rich and poor countries were failing to make much progress at a special climate summit held in Italy alongside the annual G8 jamboree.
And only the night before, the Prince of Wales had warned in this year's Richard Dimbleby Lecture, as The Daily Telegraph yesterday prominently reported, that the world had only 96 months to avoid irreversible climate change, which he called "the living hell" that "now looms on the horizon".
Prof Holdren and – he makes clear – President Obama share the Prince's sense of urgency. He says it is already too late for the world to stop "dangerous" climate change and can now only hope to avoid "catastrophic, unmanageable change" where global warming runs out of control.
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Click the link at the top for the rest of the article. I first read about this on Mark Steyn's blog over at NRO (who linked to it) and could have sworn it was a joke. This gives you a pretty good idea of the kind of people we are up against in the Global
warmingclimate change debate. It is nearly impossible to change people's minds about their religions.
