And to be fair to China, they do get it. They're just stuck on the "growth" juggernaut and it's hard to get so many people to change their attitude all at once.
It's not China which worries me though. It's their northern neighbours.
Russia has long shown that they view climate change as a massive positive to their country. Whether they're opening up new shipping routes and oil reserves around the Arctic, or pumping more gas from previously permafrosted land, the Kremlin can only see the benefits to a warmer world.
But have they just had their wake-up call? Temperatures hitting 40 degrees, a third of their grain harvest wrecked, and farmers already killing cattle because they know there will be no feed for them over the coming winter.
President Medvedev is beginning to say the right things to the country, even going so far as to say they should take climate change into consideration in their preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics.
But is the population listening? The Russian newspapers certainly don't seem to be. According to the Guardian:
Moscow's tabloid press has even speculated that the United States orchestrated the heatwave in order to favour its own grain exporters by blasting Russia with harmful rays from a research station in Alaska.There's a passage in the James Bond novel Thunderball by Ian Fleming, in which Largo remembers a warning from Blofeld about two Russians on the SPECTRE team:
"Conspiracy," Blofeld had said, " is their lifeblood. Hand in hand with conspiracy walks suspicion. These two men will always be wondering if they are not the subject of some subsidiary plot - to give them the most dangerous work, to make them fall-guys for the police, to kill them and steal their share of the profits...For them, the obvious plan, the right way to do a thing, will have been chosen for some ulterior reason which is being kept hidden from them."Fiction, I know, but it would certainly explain the Russian attitude to climate change.
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