Climate change shows it's economical face.

Well Mr Blair, it appears that now is the time to stop talking and start doing. I mean, until now the questions of Climate Change have been asked by scientists and some well meaning politicians. Actually there I am wrong, as it seems that yourself and your fellow colleagues in the Conservatives (New-Tory?!) and Liberal-Democrats have all suddenly jumped onto the band-wagon once that you had discovered that a few of us 'normal' people do care about what is going to happen once you and us have all disappeared and left the sorry mess of a World to our great-grand children.

Now you see, we know that you and your friends in parliament and possibly your friends around the world (that would be G.W. Bush then) will need to take notice since the report that you had commissioned by the former Chief Economist of the World Bank, Nicholas Stern, has been published.

The report, aptly titled the climate change report, states the views of the publisher as believing that climate change will threaten an economic crisis that would result in a 20% cut in living standards and could plunge the globe into a recession worse than that of the 1930s. The loss of a fifth of the world's wealth would result in the loss of potentially billions of lives and whilst those already poor people in the developing world would suffer most the impact would almost certainly be felt by each and every one of us.

But the report is not all doom and gloom. Mr Stern says that an investment of just 1% of the global GDP over the next 50 years should allow for stabilisation of Carbon Dioxide (the key greenhouse gas) at 500-550 parts per million. Whilst this is a 25% rise on today’s levels Stern states that this is a "high but acceptable" level. The cost of failing to act may add up to $4 trillion by 2100, by which time we may have lost a huge amount of food producing land to rising tides and desertification. There is no reason why this 1% of Global GDP can not be collected and distributed by the United Nations.

However Mr Blair, we need to look at a few issues of globalisation before we can think realistically about placing money into minimising climate change. You see the problem is that the issue of making savings and subsequent profits in business is part of the problem! Allow me to explain with an example. The well known UK Company that is Marks and Spencer used to have its garments made in the UK. The products were manufactured in the UK and delivered to central depots where they were then distributed to all of their UK stores. Now, due to the UK's "poor value", production of these garments was switched to Turkey and Mauritius, from where they then needed to be shipped to the UK and then distributed to local stores. Once again, M&S noticed that both Turkey and Mauritius offered poor value for money and so production needed to be switched to the Peoples Republic (hmmm!) of China, where even bigger savings could be made on production costs, despite the garments needing to be shipped even further across the globe. Surely, Mr Blair, you can see that in order to increase profits, companies and expending even more resources (particularly oil) as a consequence.

An off shoot of the increased global shipping traffic is that the Panama Canal needs to be made larger in order to allow for the increased shipping to move from the Pacific to the Atlantic and back again. This building project will further increase the output of Carbon dioxide emissions with both the burning of oil to power the machines used to shift the soil and to bring in the cement on top of that released by the process which causes concrete to set. It sure is going to get hot over Panama!

Another thing, I remember in the recently past summer (2006) that there was a number of droughts in Kenya and Ethiopia. Despite the lack of water to their people, these governments still allowed for fruits and vegetables (and flowers!!!), which had been grown in these countries using the much needed resource of water to be shipped to the UK markets. Why are we still shipping fruits and vegetables away from people who could probably do with eating these good fruit and vegetables when we could easily grow these foods at home using a little investment, hydroponics and heating provided by renewable resources? Maybe a few nationalised British farms may be the answer, though I shall discuss this another time.

Come on Mr Blair, you know that it makes could business sense to halt climate change sooner rather than later and here is a little advice which may help cut down on global emissions, let us not invade any countries for a while, they all seem to be so far away these days.