This follows a year of exponential oil and gas exploration from China, who have recently headed into Canada, Nigeria, Iraq, their own territory, and Uganda just last week, while its interest in Ghana continues to stumble on. A few weeks back China announced that it was planning to increase oil and gas production by 27%, and to do that without eating heavily into its reserves it needs a lot of global expansion. And as the FT notes, Western companies are only too happy to partner with them considering their own core markets, still effectively recessed, are pretty stagnant.

The potential for revenue flowing out of an oil-rich nation is obvious, and Argentina is no exception; but as well as potentially channelling oil revenues towards international corporate partnerships instead of indigenous populations, China’s latest exploration announcement comes at time when their stance on emissions is cloudier than ever. Their eventual ’support’ of the already limp-wristed Copenhagen accord came last week, but it’s not a full ‘association’ with the agreement but rather a ‘listing’ in it. So they’re sort of attached to an agreement that sort of gets people to reduce their carbon emissions, while quite definitely expanding their emissions on a global scale. And this is being offset with some very unconvincing distractions in the form of alleged snubs at the conference. The tedious and ineffectual playground politics of climate change continue.

China is installing coal-to-gas plants, investing in renewables, seeing their low-carbon industries get major surges in investor confidence, and now the UK government is recognising the potential China has for UK low-carbon businesses. But none of this is enough to generate the kind of growth China is looking for, and we’re back again to the central difficulty that lies at the heart of all global climate discussions – the right for previously undeveloped countries to develop their economies. It’s absolutely China’s right to advance the wealth of its people, and it’s both immoral, impractical and as CNOOC’s tie-ups with the likes of Shell show, an impediment to business to try and prevent that. Nevertheless, and whatever the ills of already developed nations, this right is what’s taking the world from ecological precariousness to permanent damage.

Greed, with its constant recourse to the shortest distance between desire and result, will always channel efforts towards the quickest and easiest solution; it unfortunately therefore often outpaces innovation. It creates an imperative for innovation, as we can see from the aforementioned growing investment opportunities for low-carbon businesses, but its unforgiving engine doesn’t leave room for long-term concerns. If the psytrance bongo campervan crew ever had a point to make against capitalism, then this surely is it.

Some synapse-freaking numbers for you: Buffett spent $26.6bn yesterday, but he already owned 22.5% of Burlington, so the company is now valued at $34bn, plus Buffett has taken on $10bn of the company’s debt. And Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett’s holding company, still has $20bn to play with, and play with it he will. 

It’s a turnaround for Buffett, who was slagging off rail in the middle part of this decade – now, while acknowledging that rail requires constant injections of capital to keep it rolling, Buffett is putting his faith in rail being a growing sector. And away from the pell-mell of the stock markets and debate over whether the economy is going to pick up enough to warrant this investment, the most interesting part of this deal is what it says about America’s environmentally-conscious future.

On the one hand, Buffett is putting his faith in coal with this deal. Burlington hauls enough coal to power one in every ten American homes – it’s their second-largest revenue generator after consumer products. Buffett is keen to point out that coal from the American West, which Burlington serves, is “more competitive, it’s lower-sulfur coal than in the East”, and while he admits that “over time, coal is going to diminish somewhat”, he’s still gone into this deal because he knows America will be running on coal for many years to come. He plays up his green credentials, citing his use of wind power, but he also runs 11 coal-fired power stations through MidAmerican Energy. If the Oracle says coal is profitable, then it’s profitable.

On the other hand, his faith in rail implies a lack of faith in road haulage. With oil prices set to rise, it makes sense for Buffett to invest in the most fuel-efficient means of transportation – he said yesterday that one gallon of diesel can haul a ton of goods for 471 miles with BNSF trains. Lower fuel costs mean lower haulage prices, which means a competitive advantage. Indeed, if oil prices continue to rise, “long haul trucking could be a dinosaur”, as Scott Edward Anderson told Fox News yesterday – Anderson, of Greenskeptic.com, said that a likely scenario is of long-haul rail linking with short-haul hybrid vehicles. Buffett, along with his investment in Chinese auto and electric car battery manufacturer BYD, is clearly shoring up Berkshire for a post-carbon future. Buffett is only following larger trends, but the sums of money he’s spending are so large and his influence so strong, that he himself is accelerating these changes in American energy habits. 

Though of course it could be that the main reason for Buffett buying up the railway is that it’s because he knows about the impending removal of global borders, and is therefore planning to better do business in what were formerly known as Canada and Mexico. Yeah, that’s probably it. 

Photo: Art Comments

Of course, the issue is the giant hypocrisy that has developed nations, who produce the vast majority of the world’s carbon emissions, telling developing nations that they’re not allowed to produce carbon on anything like the same scale as they are. The developing countries obviously say that they have every right to expand their industry and wealth – India prickled during the summer when put under pressure by the US to cut emissions, saying that they absolutely wouldn’t reduce emissions; they indignantly published figures that showed that in over twenty years from now, their carbon output per capita would still be a quarter of what the US’s output is.

Since then they’ve been somewhat placated by David Miliband, who said last week that he knew India “took climate change seriously”. “I think they are beginning to understand the ground realities in India. You have to talk to each other not at each other”, one Indian campaigner told the Guardian.

Africa, equally, is being fairly aggressive over the potential treatment by the west at the conference, though coming from a completely different angle. While India and China are ramping up their industry, Africa is just trying to pull in a harvest, and climate change stands to affect them the most – “rain does not come at the same time during the start of the planting season or it comes in torrential downpours, or not at all”, as one African agricultural policymaker wrote this week. India and China are trying to preserve their right to emissions; Africa is demanding that developed nations reduce their emissions by 80-95% below 1990 levels by 2050. 

Ethiopian PM Meles Zenawi came out fighting last week, saying: “Africa will not be there to express its participation by merely warming the chairs or to make perfunctory speeches and statements… If need be we are prepared to walk out of any negotiations that threaten to be another rape of our continent”. He also said that Africa wouldn’t be palmed off with pots of money to help them cope with the effects of global warming: “We will never accept any global deal that does not limit global warming to the minimum unavoidable level, no matter what levels of compensation and assistance are promised to us”.

To satisfy all parties is therefore going to require more than just a free messenger bag and 20 complimentary minutes at the hotel spa, and the west knows it. The World Bank is already making soothing noises about the package of compensation and technology India can expect to receive to help them lower their carbon emissions and provide incentives to their people to reduce them further. Furthermore, Michael Spence, the chair of its Commission on Growth and Development, said that a heavy-handed approach towards developing nations could cause “ugly” and “terrifying” consequences: “Trying to get commitments to long-term target emissions from developed and developing countries is unwise and unlikely to result in an agreement”, he said yesterday. He advocates instead letting the developing countries expand their carbon-emitting industries towards the levels of their western chums, before getting everyone to gently reduce their emissions together through new technologies and carbon trading.

Basically, Copenhagen is going to be a diplomatic nightmare. Start bulk ordering the placatory Ferrero Rocher now.

The report is ambitious – 1.2m jobs created in low-carbon industries by the middle of the next decade, 30% of electricity being generated from renewables by 2020, 10,000 wind turbines by 2020. But amid the endless graphs, pie charts and pictures of children playing in meadows, the report has some pretty contentious points. The fact that the targets are reliant on carbon capture and nuclear energy is worrying – we’ve seen that the bickering has already begun between the public and private sector over nuclear investment, while carbon capture is a relatively unproven technology, and the “four demonstration plants” that have been announced will have a minimal impact. Energy security in the medium to long term is one of the major aims of the paper, and to be applauded – but will its ambition mean increased dependence on imported energy making up the shortfall in the short term?

On renewables, Miliband is admirably bold, effectively saying that well-off consumers and industry must help foot the bill for the implementation of renewable energy. Home energy bills are set to rise by as much as £230, as the Daily Mail splutters; Miliband repeatedly mentions looking after the vulnerable, which the Mail translates into an attack on the middle classes. Miliband also gives a veiled dig at anti-wind NIMBYs – “The biggest threat to England’s green and pleasant land is not the wind turbine, it is climate change”. And it’s good to see the Daily Express, a paper for whom a single traffic cone can conjure an entire page of editorial, really going after the big points of the report: “Parking in new eco-towns ‘could cost you £13,000′”. It’s a bad day for suburban bitterness!

One of the most surprising aspects is the promise of £60m for “marine energy”, funding projects in Cornwall, the North East and the Orkneys, as well as mooting the possibility of harnessing the Severn tide. It looked like the government had forgotten about tidal energy amid its wind obsessions of late – let’s hope the funding proves a stimulus for the private sector. As for biomass, the government seems less convinced, because of our inability to produce enough biological fuel on these shores.

As the Guardian notes, this massive report is “the energy strategy Britain has lacked ever since Margaret Thatcher gave up on coal.” It’s ambitious, probably overambitious, but aside from the emphasis on getting the middle classes to protect against fuel poverty, it’s difficult to see what the Tories would do much differently. We await the wearying, interminable stumbling blocks placed by everyone from local protest groups to the big cheeses of private energy to push these targets over into the 2020s, but for now we’ve finally got a detailed plan to go on.

Gordon Brown said last year that he wants all British vehicles to be hybrid or electric by 2020, and the announcement comes as various major car manufacturers outline their plans for electric cars. Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn was talking up his company’s prospects yesterday: ”Somebody’s got to invest massively and bring to the market zero emission cars, and we think we can do it”, he said, before slagging off GM’s Chevy Volt for being, at $40,000, way too expensive. Chrysler is developing the Dodge Circuit, an electric sports car, to be the first of five electric or hybrid models to be out by 2012 (that’s if it can negotiate a deal with Fiat to manufacture them). Mitsubishi have recently been showing off the i-Miev, a tiny car that looks like a cheerful robotic hamster storing food in its cheeks, and plans to launch it in 2010. Then there’s the adorably happy little gentleman pictured above, the Peapod, who can only go at 25mph and is designed as a “neighbourhood” vehicle, but which is so goshdarned cute I could just eat it all up.

This month’s Fortune magazine features Warren Buffett alongside the Chinese electric car company he’s invested in, BYD. Don’t underestimate the power of the Oracle – his slavish followers will be on the BYD waiting list before you know it. It only costs $22,000, and looks like a Saab if you squint hard enough, but does have its limitations – its 60-mile range is only good if you’re pootling along at 30mph, while lack of demand in China might be a stumbling block to expansion.

Vauxhall have announced the Ampera, which looks totally evil, the sort of thing the Terminator would take his kids to football practice in. Encouragingly though, it could be built at Ellesmere Port, helping the UK, as Boris Johnson potentially sees it, to be the “electric car capital of Europe”. Ah, and therein lies the rub.

£250m is a drop in the ocean in terms of the investment in infrastructure needed for electric cars to be feasible UK-wide. George Osbourne has  described the plans as “fantasy”, highlighting the lack of preparation for charging points and no mention of a grid to deal with the extra electricity demands created by a nation of electric car drivers. And as John Sauven, chief exec of Greenpeace, told the Telegraph: “electric cars are only as green as the electricity they run on”.

The recent fails concerning renewable energy funding means these cars aren’t going to be running on wind or waves; it looks like Ed Miliband’s next generation of nuclear power plants is going to be sorting out energy in the medium term, but until they’re operational the UK is going to running on carbon-rich gas, right when the electric car revolution is meant to begin.

I scraped a B at GCSE, but let’s do some maths anyway. Assuming you charge your 25kWh car battery from a gas-fired power station emitting 400g of carbon per kilowatt hour, you’ll create 10,000g of carbon dioxide to charge an electric car for a day. An electric car like the Ampera or Volt can generally go about 64km on a charge. A 1.4l diesel Ford Fiesta generates 119g of CO2 per km, or 7616g over 64km; that’s 2,384g less carbon than the electric car, right? (Please tell me in the comments if I’ve really dropped the ball here). OK, so a diesel Fiesta has very low emissions compared with most vehicles, and this doesn’t take into account the carbon created by manufacturing the diesel, but even so, electric cars charged off gas-fired power stations (which aren’t even as bad as coal ones) can’t really claim to be cutting Britain’s carbon emissions substantially. And the above scenario doesn’t take into account the strain that fast-charging batteries will have on a power grid.

There’s also a huge shortfall in Hoon’s proposal in terms of allowing the UK to reap the benefits of the electric car. Sure, the Ampera might be built in the North West, but the batteries will be coming from China. If oil-producing nations were the beneficiaries of the internal combustion engine, then battery-producing nations are set to be richly rewarded in the electric car age – the market for lithium-ion batteries to be used in cars could reach $17bn by just 2012. To say, as Labour are, that your electric car plans are to merely subsidise people to buy them, rather than even attempting to tap into the revenue-generating potential they have, is pretty pathetic.

Obviously the government championing electric cars is a good thing, but they have to be powered by renewables, they have to involve British industry, and they have to have a supporting infrastructure that will stay in place for decades to come. Concentrating on the consumers should be the last on this list of priorities; Labour is currently putting it up at the top.