I have to say I agree with most of what Chris Hedges says in this interview about the daunting challenges we face in trying to take action to avoid the most catastrophic consequences from Global Warming.
Update: Hedges was incorrect in his explanation of what happened to the trees on Easter Island. Cooler weather over a extended between the years 1390 and 1505 caused dormancy in the palm trees, and all the palm trees stopped pollinating.
This is especially prescient with the COP 20 conference underway now in Lima Peru, with the United States putting meaningful progress at risk.
Lima climate talks: EU and US at odds over legally binding emissions targets
EU says mandatory carbon emissions cuts should be set for all countries, whereas US wants individual countries to be free to adjust the scale and pace of reductions
By Dan Collyns
The European Union (EU)’s delegation at the climate change conference in Lima has argued that legally binding cuts applying to all countries are necessary and should be adopted by 2015 and entered into force by 2020.
The EU appears to have toughened its stance faced with major nations which claim they could not impose economy wide targets. Bardram hinted that such positions could stall the negotiating process in the lead-up to the Paris meeting.
“We don’t want to get to Paris and realise that the targets and the contributions did not add up to what we needed,” Bardram told the Guardian, adding that the EU wanted the 2015 agreement to have “legal force through robust rules, procedures and institutions, to ensure long-term certainty and accountability”.
The EU’s stance is at odds with the US position which favours the ‘buffet option’, that would contain some legally binding elements but allow countries to determine the scale and pace of their emissions reductions, even if this this calls into question the aim of keeping temperature rises below 2C, the level that countries have agreed to limit warming to.
“What the United States is putting on the table is basically the Wild West,” Asad Rehman of Friends of the Earth told the Guardian at the conference. “Having a deregulated climate system, having countries just make any pledge they want is a recipe for disaster. What we need is science-based rigorous regulations, it’s the only way are going to tackle this climate crisis,” he said.
This news about our own government's insistence on a less stringent regulatory regime allowing more leniency for carbon emissions, putting the prospects of reaching any meaningful agreement in jeopardy is extremely disappointing, to put it mildly.