We noted that the paper itself is firmly in the frame of Kyoto agreements – dealing with the allocation of responsibility and not with further issues either of how climate change problems are produced or tackled. Ironically the challenges it confronts (dealing with how targets, etc. are reallocated when states fail) point to the folly of in any case imagining that responsibility can and should be parcelled up in this way. In short, most of the world is not like the EU!
We talked about how wars wreck and inspire infrastructures– and about different modes of doing war (i.e. labour and capital intensive, and the energy implications of these modes). We wondered about how the UK military responds to energy saving and other targets – just by recycling a bit or having more efficient boilers, or maybe re-thinking the meaning of training and the need for lots of flying around, etc.? We also talked a bit about how climate change related crises might underpin or exacerbate future conflict. On all counts it was a really useful paper to provoke more demanding thoughts.