It’s the NIMTOO approach to climate catastrophe!

You may have heard there’s to be an 80 per cent reduction in something-or-other.

It is not at all clear what "80 per cent" means; it sounds like a terrific reduction, but 80 per cent of what?

Slippery qualifications have been added which

in effect render the commitment so imprecise as to be meaningless.

Is there anything else that's unrealistic about it?

Yes. There are no interim targets, no steps marked out along the way. It's the easiest thing in the world for politicians to get together and promise to do something 41 years from now; none of them will be around to take the blame if it doesn't happen (there's a good acronym for it – Nimtoo, or Not In My Time Of Office). They promise to undertake "robust mid-term reductions", but they don't say what or when.

This will be the greatest common enterprise on which humanity has ever embarked. To bring it about you might instinctively think wind farms, or solar panels, or electric cars

[No, this blog would would never think electric cars were the solution. Electric cars are a gigantic confidence trick. Editor.]

It is becoming obvious that technological fixes are much preferred by politicians to asking people to change their behaviour.