One Month Until This Year's Climate Change Circus Begins!

From Bali in 2007 (when we still thought we had a chance to get it right) to Poznan (where nothing whatsoever seemed to happen), then from Copenhagen in 2009 (where Obama and his henchmen, including the prime minister of my country, threw every climate change activist in the world into a depression of some duration) to Cancun in 2010 (where the very courageous Pablo Solón representing Bolivia was the lone voice for a rapid and scientifically rationale response to the emergency), the UN's climate change negotiations have become more and more circus-like.

As in circus: |ˈsərkəs| A traveling company of acrobats, trained animals, and clowns that gives performances, typically in a large tent, in a series of different places.

The Durban Climate Change Conference starts one month from tomorrow, and will run from November 29 to December 9, 2011. Durban is a (mostly) lovely seaside city in South Africa; too bad it, too, will be turned into a circus. (The name "Copenhagen" is now associated with farce and failure.)

We've had a Bali Road Map, a Copenhagen Accord (see? nothing happened in Poznan, Poland), a set of Cancun Agreements — and still, absolutely NO national or international declaration that we've reached "dangerous interference with the climate system" (a UN Framework Convention on Climate Change trick: if we don't declare it, we don't have to do anything about it). NO declaration that we're in a global climate change emergency. NO emergency response. NO result from any of these conferences that has actually led to any nation, anywhere, moving toward a zero-carbon economy. (Even the disappearing Maldive Islands are only heading for carbon neutrality, not zero carbon.)

Where's our global imagination? Why aren't we excited about working together to envision the zero-carbon economy? (After all, it'll be safer, cleaner, healthier, more equitable and more peaceful than what we've got now!) Why do our leaders and negotiators feel such disdain for our (and their own) children and grandchildren? For our whole species? For life itself? Why do they act the role of such ecologically illiterate, callous clowns when they get together at these climate change conferences?

May this year's negotiators keep the world's most vulnerable, the children of all species, and future generations in their hearts and minds as they do their negotiating. Who else could they possibly think they're negotiating for???

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Hey, great cartoon, eh? I commissioned it from Stephanie McMillan, award-winning editorial cartoonist. If you want to use it, let me know and I'll send you a high quality version. Visit her Code Green website to see more ("Just a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down..."), or to commission your own cartoon.

"Selfish &%$#@!" Theme Week: Friday

So many sad things in the news these days. I suppose the reason we here in the West (in EuroAmerican countries) are okay with committing atrocities overseas and allowing or even supporting atrocities overseas (short-term and long-term atrocities) is that if we don't think about it (look at it, hear about it, talk about it), it's not a problem.

For example, a new study out of Norway shows that Norwegians are in denial about climate change not because they "don't believe in it" (it's not a religion, after all), but because acknowledging climate change will challenge their image of themselves as nice people who don't harm anyone (except with the greenhouse gas emissions from their economy based on oil and gas). Here is Paul Thagard describing the research at Psychology Today:

Kari Marie Norgaard is an American sociologist who spent a year in a small city in Norway interviewing people about their beliefs and attitudes concerning climate change.... Norgaard says that global warming is difficult for ordinary Norwegians to think about because it threatens their individual and collective sense of identity. Norwegians tend to view themselves as egalitarian and socially just on an international scale, so it is difficult for them to acknowledge that their country's large production of oil and gas contributes to global warming....

Given their knowledge of climate change and their political values, it upsets Norwegians to think that global warming is a threat to human well-being, so they steer clear of thinking and talking about it.... Norgaard plausibly argues that explanation of climate change denial by ordinary Norwegians needs to be framed in terms of complex links between emotions and social structures. Denial results not just from individual thought processes, but also from processes of social interaction that encourage people to talk and think in some ways rather than others.

What if we turned these thought processes and social norms on their heads, and started asking Americans and Canadians and Norwegians and all the other comfortable, fossil-fuel producing/consuming people in the world to approach the climate change emergency with compassion, altruism, and selflessness. Because caring about the world's most vulnerable will, in the end, be good for all of us.

Selfish &%$#@! Theme Week is wrapping up today, so I just want to say it one more time. Selfishness when it comes to what we do (or don't do) today to mitigate climate change for future generations will come back to bite us in the butt. And if you're so old that you scoff at that notion, then please consider your role as an ancestor, or simply as a fellow human being.

And yes, to the man who said those incredibly selfish things in our local newspaper, I am talking to you. Please, have a heart and get some compassion. For your karma if not for your kids. Feel free to contact me if you want to learn more about the science.

p.s. I'm taking tomorrow off. Going to spend the day with some very unselfish, wonderful friends.

"Selfish &%$#@!" Theme Week: Thursday

Selfish &%$#@! do this self-righteous, oh-poor-me thing whenever anyone challenges their fabrications, mis(anthropic)interpretations and cherry-picked data.

These climate change denialists keep forgetting that (a) they do indeed have the right to their own opinions (even when those opinions make them look like selfish &%$#@!), (b) they do not have the right to make up their own facts, and (c) all the evidence, all around them, shows them to be wrong, dead wrong. With tragic, lethal and catastrophic results.

And now that panel reports are showing the economic costs of climate change, and research reports are showing the urgency of the climate change emergency, and agronomists (you know, those scientists who study soil management and crop production) are freaking out about the dual hazards of too much or too little water and higher temperatures — well, now we're seeing the true colours (and complete ignorance) of some of our favourite selfish &%$#@!.

For example, as Reuter's reports, (Canada's) "Environment Minister Peter Kent responded by saying the report showed the importance of adapting to climate change." Dear kind sir, how do people adapt to burning forests, withered crops, unsafely high temperatures, increasingly freakish weather? How? If you had an ounce of understanding (of the, ahem, environmental science underlying the climate crisis, Mr. Environment Minister), courage or compassion, you would be talking about lowering Canada's greenhouse gas emissions as rapidly as possible, as quickly as possible, starting yesterday!!

But because you selfishly put your campaign contributions and your narrow worldview before the lives of all the young people alive today, you do nothing but kowtow to fossil fuel interests.

I could go on, and on and on and on. But I want to — selfishly — enjoy the rest of my day. So let me just leave you with this. Now there are complaints that renewable energy infrastructure is leading to ugliness ... as though power lines and oil pipelines are not ugly. As though famines and droughts and floods are not ugly.

I don't know ... can selfishness get any deeper? Any more callous? "I want my (own ugly) brand of beauty back!" Then stop using so much energy, doughbrain! Sheesh. (Oops, am I going to get in trouble for calling someone a doughbrain?)

p.s. For an interesting look at transmission tower as art, by extension proving that wind turbines and solar panels can also be seen as art, click here.

"Selfish &%$#@!" Theme Week: Wednesday

So, another day, another look at how selfishness is finishing us off.

Has anyone else felt sickened by what's happened to Libya? A country that was taken from poorest in the world to highest standard of living in Africa (and if you think that's not saying much, higher standard of living than Russia, Brazil and Saudi Arabia, I've read) ... trashed because our EuroAmerican culture cannot tolerate economic diversity!

We are so selfishly and slavishly attached to our deadly capitalist, free-market mono-economy that Qaddafi's form of socialism (you know, free health care and education, affordable housing, shared profits from nationally-owned oil fields, a debt-free nation) drove us nuts. Indeed, drove us to foment revolution, which turned us into murderers and assassins — killing the people we said we were going there to protect. The real reason the US led NATO into Libya is that Qaddafi was forming an African economic union around the gold dinar, and the US doesn't like anyone using a currency that isn't theirs. Can you say Saddam Hussein? (Do some research, people!)

Free-market economy. Yeah, sure — except when it's someone else's. Our Western nations cannot stand being left out of a game!

So what's all this got to do with climate change? Indeed, Libya's wealth was oil-based, so it wasn't all roses. But if you're willing to look deeply into what happened in, er, to Libya, you'll discover why the Big Boys won't make or allow the necessary transition to a zero-carbon economy. They want to own everything themselves. They want to have all the money. They want to be the only winners. They want everyone else to be losers. They are, in short, selfish &%$#@!.

Compassion? Okay, I'm betting that most of these people in high places had horrible little childhoods with no love from their parents. And either too much money or not enough of it. So I can feel sorry for them for that.

But you know, teachers have a saying: "Judge the behaviour, not the child." However, when it comes to adults, I'm judging them by their behaviour! So if their behaviour is selfish, then so are they. And if their behaviour is mean-spirited, then so are they. Ergo, they are selfish &%$#@!, pure and simple.