'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

First there was the family, then the tribe, then the nation and now there is the world. This century should become known as the time when it was realised that there is no percentage in thinking about ‘them and us’ anymore, unless you mean ET.

The chances are that you are not who you think you are, anyway. The Irish think of themselves as Celts but turn out to be Norsemen. I think of myself as an Anglo-Saxon, but I am a Jew in the sense that my great-grandmother was a Jew and I am directly descended from her maternal line. As Jonathan Miller once put it, I am a Jew, but not Jewish.

Now, the Chinese for all their various languages and their huge number are very strong on national identity, so strong that they argue that The Western World has been producing carbon emissions for a century and they therefore have the right to ‘catch up’. This is the kind of argument, which comes straight from the ‘them and us’ school, and ignores the world itself.

 They have since put forward a far more interesting proposition. At the Kyoto conferences, each country is looked at on the basis of how much carbon it emits or how much carbon it is no longer absorbing – by cutting down rain forest and establishing grazing land, for example. A table is then made up which establishes the US as the prime offender, with China in second place. The UK emits far less carbon than China and is some way down the table. ‘No’, say China. ‘This is all wrong. The table should be structured by looking at a nations population and should work on a   carbon emission per person basis.’ This changes everything and makes the UK for instance, a far greater offender than China.

On the one hand, the giant polluters must be curbed, but on the other is it not reasonable that there be a common emissions standard for every person on the planet? In spite of the obvious threat to my personal lifestyle inherent in this approach, I have to admit that in theory at any rate, it is reasonable. Not only is it reasonable, but if tackled reasonably, it could not only be a breakthrough for Kyoto, but a breakthrough for world politics. What I would hope for would be a ‘you keep your emissions where they are while we bring ours down to your level’ style of approach. This in turn would have to recognise the underlying problem we are up against, and that problem is of course the number of people on the planet and the number who are in no position to emit much of anything at all.

Yes, it leads us full circle to realise that nothing can be done about one thing without doing something about the other. There is no point in looking at these issues in isolation. Sometime or other we must grasp the nettle and get serious about making this a great place for everything and everyone to live. There are so many things that must be done even get to first base, and there is no chance of us ever getting there unless we all have the same goal in mind.

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