If I read you right you are calling me demagogic because I say that you should support austerity measures if you are serious about reducing CO2 emissions. But that is what almost everyone who shares your anxiety about climate change is saying. Where are the environmentalists who are saying that we need to defend working class living standards? I hear and read a long list of demands for reduced consumption, especially household consumption. Indeed even your own prescription against transporting goods would push prices up considerably. I have been commenting on this trend in environmental thinking for more than a decade:
In 1996 I reviewed the miserablist prognoses of the Real World Coalition who warned that "it cannot be expected that the disposable incomes of ordinary, reasonably comfortable households in Britain will rise significantly". When I researched the history of the concept of sustainability for a book published in 2002, I found that right from the outset it was a polemic for austerity, when Margaret Laws was arguing for "cuts in consumption" (Margaret Laws Smith, Towards the Creation of a Sustainable Economy London, Conservation Society, 1975, p9). (The fact the ecologists' intuition that working class consumption must fall *precedes* the theory of anthropogenic climate change only indicates that it is a belief that does not need a scientific underpinning.)
Your view that these things can be fixed by turning off office heating overnight seems inadequate to the problem as you describe it.
But then the problem as you describe it is not really the problem according to the IPCC. Their estimate is an increase in temperature of between 1.8 and 4 degrees celsius by 2100. This, they estimate means sea levels could rise by between 18 and 59 centimetres by 2100 (not six metres, as Al Gore suggests). Some people have pointed to the figure of a seventy metre rise in water levels, but they have failed to notice that this is the projection if melting occurs for millennia.
And despite being reported as saying that the Antarctic will melt, the IPCC says current global model studies project that the Antarctic ice sheet 'will remain too cold for widespread surface melting and is expected to gain in mass due to increased snowfall'. IPCC, Summary for Policymakers, p 13.
But overall I am glad to see that Patrick Bond has not been intimidated out of the skies by George Monbiot's absurd thesis that air travel is in its environmental consequences worse than child abuse. I look forward to him flying over this way, too. And I am glad, too, that Patrick, and you want to see two billion more electricity customers. And that you want to defend the living standards of US workers. I take it to mean that neither of you truly believe that climate change is quite as important an issue as you say. By all means, go to church on a Sunday, just as long as it does not interfere with your revolutionary activities in the week.