There's been some talk about "green varnish".

By this I mean the greening of the conservative parties of the Anglo-Saxon world. This strategy is a mainly PR driven restyling of conservative parties in the European fashion that has transpired over the last ten years or so. What Australia's, Canada's and America's political right is beginning to learn from their British counterparts (and have had to learn under pressure from political opponents) is the need for environmental camouflage - in more or less exactly the same mode socialist, labour and even traditional free market liberals have painted themselves in populist green varnish.

Now that everyone is outdoing each other in green spin and rhetoric, now that every single government on the planet is clamouring for the green vote (left, right and centre), it has become increasingly frustrating for the political left to attack their opponents on environmental credentials. This is one of the reasons why the ostensible conversion of Presidents Bush as a champion of environmental protection is regarded as suspicious if not outrageous as David Cameron's original scheme to don the eco-mantle and call Labour's green bluff.

Canada has just passed an environmental camouflage measure.

The House of Commons passed a bill Wednesday intended to force the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper to achieve the steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions required by the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

The vote was 161 to 113, with all three opposition parties supporting the Liberal Party bill. It still has to go to the Senate, where a Liberal majority should ensure its passage.

The bill would require the government within 60 days to detail the measures Canada would take to meet its Kyoto obligations to reduce greenhouse gases to 6 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

Canada’s emissions are 27 percent above 1990 levels, and the government has said it would be impossible to meet the targets without doing great damage to the economy.

Labor Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn said the Liberals were simply trying to embarrass the government by trying to force draconian steps that would paralyze Canada.

It's silly season I guess. We'll have to go through this now - and waste all sorts of time, energy and resources - before more sensible views can be heard above the din. It's what politicians do - like baby kissing and god bothering (do they still do that? Well, like they used to do maybe?) - and has nothing to do with governance or the threats we face.

The US is not so bad, but may be in decline too.

Electric power companies, which emit about one-third of America’s global warming gases, could reduce their emissions to below the levels of 1990, but that would take about 20 years, no matter how much the utilities spend, according to a new industry study.

The report, prepared by the Electric Power Research Institute, a nonprofit consortium, is portrayed as highly optimistic by its authors, who will present the findings on Thursday at an energy conference in Houston.

It assumes that “money grows on trees and all research is successful,” said one of them, Bryan J. Hannegan. “This is as good as we think we can get, right now.” . . .

The industry study calls for 64 gigawatts of additional nuclear power by 2030, an increase of about two-thirds from the current level. For the first time in three decades, several companies have expressed interest recently in ordering new reactors, but they will probably take nearly 10 years to build and experts expect no more than six or eight in the first round.

The study’s figure implies a net increase of about 50 new reactors by 2030; the Energy Department is counting on about 10.

The study also calls for cutting the growth in demand for electricity, which the Energy Department expects to increase at 1.5 percent a year. The study assumes growth of just 1.1 percent a year, which implies a steady decline in electricity use for each unit of economic production.

It also calls for vast growth in wind energy and some solar energy. Renewable energy (leaving out hydroelectricity) now comes to only a little over 2 percent of kilowatt-hours generated; by 2030, it would be 6.7 percent.

The biggest slice, though, is from coal plants that would capture their carbon dioxide, compress it and pipe it underground for sequestration. This is a technology that has been barely demonstrated at this point. But in a little over 20 years, it would have to produce 14.6 percent of electricity supplies.

The technologies required do exist, at least at laboratory scale. But the study does not predict costs and stipulate what is economically feasible.

Expect more European style empty gestures - paper commitments that no one in their right mind thinks will ever come to pass - to call the green bluff of climate wankers.

Politics really is stupid.

Update:

Gregory Benford, professor of plasma physics and astrophysics at the University of California, and SF writer:

The political impossibility of what I call the prohibitionist agenda--that is, carbon prohibitionism--brings a kind of hallucinogenic quality to the global-warming discussion. . . No economist I know believes that global carbon emissions can be restrained within a century to even the level we have now. Every economist knows that the timescale for changing energy infrastructure is at least half a century to a century, just because of replacement costs. Economists are scientists too, and ignoring them isn't just blind: it's perverse.