The "letter" below is a well written bit of satire taken from Rob Williamson's Greenhouse Neutral Foundation website (click for link). His blog entry (5th June) gives the links to sign the "ban the plastic bag" petition. We Jersey people have made a good at reducing our plastic bag use, but more needs to be done.
Rob Williamson is an Australian who invented a process for recycling polypropylene plastic which won him all sorts of environmental awards. He is just about the same age as me (55). He sold his recycling business and put the proceeds into establishing his Foundation. Good on yer, mate!
You will notice that he has written a book ZERO Greenhouse Emissions – The Day the Lights Went Out – Our Future World which is worth looking at – fortunately, it's not written for the expert so puts climate change, Global Warming and Man's past, present and future into plain language. It also goes into the radically transformative economic effects of climate change which are something that our Council of Ministers seems almost unaware of with their ridiculous business-almost-as-normal "Strategic Plan". This virtually airbrushes out of sight Jersey's much greater than average global responsibility to transition away from what has got to be one of the most extreme consumerist, high “standard of living”, energy and resource guzzling lifestyles in the world.
Our local environmental shadow on the world is huge. If our Ministers realised this, then they would accept that, per person, Jersey residents are fast approaching the most environmentally damaging people in the world. The irony is that we live in a very beautiful, relatively unpolluted "homeland" but, to too many, vision and responsibility stops at the foreshore.
The letter below takes the form of a leaked letter to "Mother Nature", from Government leaders, asking her to back off for a while on the destructive consequences because we haven't cleaned up our climate changing emissions urgently enough. They want to carry on propping up the status quo with their rather short-sighted living one-day-at-a-time method (translation - one political term at a time).
By the way, the excitingly different (funny but serious!) climate change book I helped with (What’s the Worst that Could Happen?) will be published on July 5th and I’ll blog about that nearer the date.
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LEAKED GOVERNMENT LETTER
Leaked by a highly reliable government source to Bob Williamson Chair of the Greenhouse Neutral Foundation
HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL – FOR YOUR EYES ONLY
Dear Mother Nature
Would you very much mind delaying your climate change impacts on our species as a result of our commercially driven devastating activities, resulting in but not limited to, the destruction of most other species that inhabit the planet along with us? We are presently experiencing a difficult time to our planned expediential extraction of finite resources on planet Earth.
In a nutshell, we have a short term cash flow crisis due to our rapacious greed and the pursuit of individual global nation’s gross domestic product (GDP). We also presently need to maintain the general public perception that our current unsustainable lifestyles can continue indefinitely.
We would ask that you delay your warming of the planet from our polluting activities for a period of (initially) one to two years – open to our review due to further unexpected commercial circumstances that at this time, we cannot predict. Due to political and commercial pressures during the next 12 months we intend to take no action whatsoever to minimise our environment impact or curb Hothouse Gas pollution. After that time we would seek a commitment from you here, to extend this contract, in terms that will suit our species and the individual commercial circumstance of the industries that run the governments of our respective countries. We would like to point out and make clear to you that at this time we have an 89% backing from those ill informed complacent global citizens /voters who have given their approval by electing us to make this advance to you. They have said it’s our job to lead and we have them on our side LOL.
We offer as an inducement to you, to continue our demonstrated preparedness to blindfold the majority of the global population, to the consequences of our past and present actions. We also offer continuing activities to reduce that which we perceive as a burden on the planet, other species who do not contribute to our global GDP.
We strongly suggest that you use your influence to defer until our further communication, any acts of God that may impact on our financial position as countries; and desist in causing further devastation to the established communities we have constructed for our coastal habitation.
The global insurance industry have kindly sponsored this letter and we have the full backing of the Coal, Oil and Gas industry lobbies along with our other corporate backers who continue to provide their (behind the scenes) support. They assure us and we assure you, that this is in our best vested interests at this time. We can also state openly here that this approach to you is backed up by the majority of the global population that has not a bloody clue, as to what we are all about.
We also notify you here, just for your information, that we are committed to supporting our financial backers and will resist any and all global discussion of a tax on pollution such as the implementation of a Carbon Tax. We know this may fix the contamination of the atmosphere by our supporters that profit from the activity, but we also know that 89%+ of the population don’t, so we have an edge on intelligence or the suppression of it.
We acknowledge this is a long letter and you have other things to do such as melting the polar ice caps and planning a few droughts, so we will accept none responsiveness as your agreement.
Thanks; and by the way we are not negotiating, we are telling you.
Signed for and on behalf of all global politicians elected to make decisions for everyone else.
PS. In closing we will deny we ever wrote this letter, so don’t even think about making it public!
Calculated from NASA’s (click for more info) “Five-Year Average Global Temperature Anomalies from 1880 to 2010” and animated. Even a trainee climate scientist has been surprised at how fast things speed up right near the last couple of decades.You need to be at least a little bit scientifically literate to realise why anomalies are way more important to show the trend rather than absolute temperatures – a distinction which many cherry picking denialists, with their “it’s really cold here, so we must be in a cooling trend” garbage thinking cannot get clear in their heads but still, even they must get it, surely? 
