Politicians do not really understand science, they are in the policy business.  And environmental activists do not understand science, they are in the advocacy business.  Both claim to love science when it suits their agenda.  When they are together, as with recent tax schemes designed to penalize carbon usage, it can be very bad.    But everyone knew this except politicians and activists, who only believe in 'the miracle of capitalism' while they are legislating the parts they don't like out of society and insisting it will flourish if they control it.

Zero-carbon energy research may be a pipe dream, or it may just need a 'Eureka!' moment, that is up for debate, but a certain amount of basic research has always gone into big ideas that may or may not work out.   However, basic research tolerance is on the funding side of the equation.  On the expense side, what the government giveth, the government can also taketh away.

Take the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire.  The Culham lab runs the Joint European Torus (JET), which is the largest fusion device in the world.  Fusion gets a bad rap because of being over-hyped by some researchers who got a lot of media attention operating in an ethical gray area but that was cold fusion - obviously fusion works or we have no Sun.   

Like the concept or not, they are pursuing clean energy yet operating a large lab and a device means they have a sizable electric bill - and the government is hitting them with a $500,000 penalty next year due to its supposed carbon emissions related to the electricity it uses.  I say 'supposed' because no one can really tell you how much carbon your car emits, or what is related to your energy usage, they make educated guesses - but the tax bill they assign to it is very real.    So labs devoted to researching clean energy, and use the budget they have for that, suddenly have to cut actual research to pay for a carbon reduction scheme of questionable value.  

Sure, driving laboratories devoted to clean energy out of business does technically reduce their carbon footprint but, as is often the case with misguided politicians and uneducated activists of the sort who brought us ethanol, it is missing the bigger picture.

Will they listen?  All politics is local, it is said, so the further you get from the local effects the less politicians care.   And no one is more removed from local effects and reality than the United Nations.    Christiana Figueres is Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and told The Guardian, "This is the inconvenient truth of where human-generated greenhouse gas emissions are projected to go without much stronger international action.   I won't hear that this is impossible."

Perhaps to an anthropologist who has spent her entire career being a bureaucrat "  I won't hear that this is impossible" is a valid statement, but in the real world if labs use their budget to pay carbon taxes they can't do the research UN bureaucrats insist will take the place of carbon if they tax it.

Figueres wants to imply greenhouse gases are still rising and the blame is equal.   China and India are leading the way in the increases while the West has slowed considerably.   If the UN can force China to listen, I am sure other countries would take attempts at world government, and crippling their economies with little evidence it will help, more seriously.