Creating extra carbon to talk climate change

The world’s largest broadcasting corporation’s plans to send more than 30 of their staff to next month’s climate change talks in Copenhagen may appear both environmentally and financially wasteful, Daily Mail reports.

According to the newspaper’s source, the BBC’s decision to send 35 people to the talks in the Danish capital will create as much carbon dioxide as an African village does in a whole year – around six to seven tons of it, if all the staff travel by plane.

The Daily Mail quotes Conservative MP Philip Davies as saying that this is “absolutely staggering” and is “yet another example of how wasteful the BBC is.”

The BBC’s delegation is to include 12 presenters, as well as a 23-strong backup team of engineers, producers and camera operators.

It is expected that even the British government is going to send fewer people to the summit, to say nothing of the UK’s Greenpeace, who are sending just two.

It follows an incident earlier this month when the BBC was criticized for “spending £20 million on an army of advisers, strategists and ‘decision makers’ at a time when program makers were facing fierce budget cuts.”

“After the scandal about BBC waste, you’d think they would be tightening their belts,” Susie Squire of the Taxpayers’ Alliance said. “It’s out of touch with what most license fee payers are thinking.”

The world leaders are gathering in Copenhagen on December 7-18 to try and elaborate on a new agreement by both developed and developing countries on the reduced emission of greenhouse gases, to succeed to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

If the deal is not agreed upon, it may lead to a dangerous rise in global temperatures by the end of the century, specialists say.