Mike's Minute: Is it time we pull out of Paris?

We adjusted our climate target, or one of our climate targets last week. 

Which in and of itself is part of the whole climate debate malaise. There are so many targets involving Paris, or not involving Paris, or timelines. 

Is it 2030, 2035, 2040, 2050? Is it 5% down on 1990, or on 2000? So many numbers and so much noise, it's no wonder so many of us have turned off. 

It's not that the broad idea doesn’t have some merit. It's just how to kill the buzz. Obsession like the Green Party, with anger, fury, and too many numbers is the classic recipe to lose the room. 

Anyway, we adjusted one of our targets. It's not as high as it was so cue the usual outrage. 

But is it time to ask, even if reluctantly, the question as to whether playing our part if not leading the way, as laudable as it might be, is now just a pointless exercise? 

It has always been true that no matter what we did it would literally make no difference to the planet. But doing our bit was important. 

With Trump and America out of Paris, and China and India and Brazil and others doing nothing but boosting emissions, what, here at the bottom of the world, is the point? 

What has become indisputably clear is that Paris will not be met, because none of the targets are ever met, and the price seems high, economically. 

Read the piece over the weekend in Britain where it was announced 9% of farmland has to go, where it will be eventually 20%. A fifth will need to be interfered with in some way so they can meet their climate targets. 

You'll have nice clean air. You just can't feed the people. It’s a hopeless ask and it's just not real. 

Hopefully science will save us because its increasingly obvious you have the lethal combination of the countries that don’t care, made worse by the fact they tend to be the large ones, and the economic sacrifice made by everyone else that is simply increasingly beyond the pale. 

In simple terms, you need to give up economic growth in order to freshen the air or clear the atmosphere. 

That, to my eye, is an argument that as more and more evidence of failure mounts, is not only never going to be one, but harder and harder to even start. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.