Sometimes a person can spend so long working on problems in one’s own backyard that you forget that climate change is a global phenomenon.
I remember being at a conference in 2005 when a speaker from China stood at the front of the room and announced that in the previous year, China had built about 80GW of generating plant. The year after, it was going to be 100 GW. And after that, 120 GW. Oh, and most of that electricity is coming from dirty, high carbon coal.* For comparison’s sake, the UK has a net generating capacity of about 74GW. So it was no wonder that we heard this – after three days of discussing how to achieve 5 to 10% savings in European countries – the entire room let out a sigh like we’d been punched in the collective stomach. As a colleague of mine poetically said,
