The two-week United Nations climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, has gone into overtime, lasting past its scheduled end as the U.S., Canada, and Japan duked it out with European countries and developing nations in a battle over emissions targets. As expected, the U.S. team, led by Chief Negotiator "Snarlin'" Harlan Watson, has successfully negotiated against specificity; the European nations agreed to drop their insistence that developed nations aim for a target of cutting greenhouse gases between 25 percent and 40 percent by 2020 in favor of continuing to simply talk about cuts instead. However, Germany's environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel, insisted the overtime haggling was good-natured, saying, "The climate in the climate conference is good." That's great, but the climate outside the climate conference isn't doing so well. Or haven't you heard?
source: Bloomberg, Associated Press, BBC News, Reuters
Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success
‘Copenhagen Diagnosis’ offers a grim update to the IPCC’s climate science
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tidal Posted 1:38 am
14 Dec 2007
President John F. Kennedy George W. Bush, May 25, XXXX Mr. Speaker, Mr. Vice President, my co-partners in Government, gentlemen and ladies:
... These are extraordinary times. And we face an extraordinary challenge. Our strength as well as our convictions have imposed upon this nation the role of leader in freedom's cause. No role in history could be more difficult or more important...
I believe we possess all the resources and talents necessary. But the facts of the matter are that we have never made the national decisions or marshaled the national resources required for such leadership. We have never specified long-range goals on an urgent time schedule, or managed our resources and our time so as to insure their fulfillment.
I therefore ask the Congress... to meet the following national goals:
First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal aspirational target, before this decade is out sometime, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth doing something about this challenge.
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RisingTideNA Posted 3:14 am
14 Dec 2007
Of course, one thing striking in both cases is with all of the progress (at least in terms of increased exposure and awareness to climate change and energy issues) how far we have to go...
But what most of the environmental movement appears to be missing though is that the distance is not just about targets (reduce co2 a lot by this date, get us off oil): it's increasingly more about the devil in the details, socially, environmentally and even climate unfriendly crap that is supposedly being done to meet these aspirations, aspirations that we ourselves are driving.
We say no to oil, so we they give us ethanol.
We say reduce your carbon footprint, we get clean coal + tree plantations to offset it. Or nukes.
And this isn't from the Republicans, nor just from the Democrats, this is just as much from the supposedly enlightened politicians in the EU, and increasingly from the environmental movement itself.
I think Jihan Gearon, of the Indigenous Environmental Network said it best:
"What scares me most about this [UN meeting] isn't that we came out of it with no targets or plan for post-Kyoto. It's that the atmosphere of the discussions seems to focus less on stopping climate change and more on how money can be made from the climate change problem, at the expense of Indigenous People."
Or another observer this time from Via Campesina in Paraguay, relayed by
Almuth Ernsting of Biofuelwatch:
"If we hold up banners saying climate change kills and we want more government action, the very power groups driving the destruction, she warned, will cheer and might give us even more carbon finance or agrofuels. Instead, she suggested, we need to mobilize against the false solutions and for real, meaningful actions that will actually cut emissions and deliver climate justice...The time for marching for 'global action on climate change' without denouncing the false solutions and the drivers of climate change is over."
I hope that we can all think seriously about our campaigning, and how a lot of messaging and actions plays right into the hands of polluters eager to capitalize on a public that is increasingly desperate for action, and politicians and energy companies more than happy to wrap up a greenwashed package of solutions for them.
For more thought on this topic, see:
http://www.altereconews.org/
http://climatechangeaction.blogspot.com/2007/12/kyoto-mor ...
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071224/wysham
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2007/12/11/rigged/ (George Monbiot, it should be noted, bas by no means the first with this assessment, see http://www.oilwatch.org/)
http://itsgettinghotinhere.org/2007/12/13/climate-justice ...
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