Good news is in very short supply in the waning hours of the Copenhagen climate summit.
Yes, it is indeed easy to pronounce something a failure as opposed to looking at the bright side. But when "the bright side" means increasing extinction, massive human suffering, and a total disregard for the scientific community, it is hard to remain chipper & optimistic.
The massive COP15 conference has an eerie parallel to the now craptacular health care legislation crawling through the U.S. Senate (at the expense of other bills including a cap & trade effort, I might add).
• Both are coming to an end around Xmas.
• Both are ignoring the majority in favor of the wealthy.
• Both have filled people with hope, only to lead them to despair.
• Both look like Teh Epic FAIL.
Protesters, may Santa bring them bail, are sick about the grandstanding, the lip service, and the intransigence of the world leaders who flew in from around the world to...to.....do what, exactly?
AP today:
In those overnight talks, the American delegation apparently objected to a proposed text it felt might bind the United States prematurely to reducing greenhouse gas emissions before Congress acts on the required legislation. U.S. envoys insisted, for example, on replacing the word "shall" with the conditional "should."
Gotta love stalemates over semantics. Saving the world, bureaucrat style...
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, among the first leaders to address the assembly, echoed the protesters' sentiments: "If the climate was a bank, a capitalist bank, they would have saved it."
From the BBC today:
It may not be possible to get a new deal over global warming at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has admitted.
Mr Brown said ministers faced an "uphill struggle" but that he was determined to play his part in "bringing the world together".
He told BBC One's Breakfast programme: "If you don't get an agreement this week, people will doubt whether you can get an agreement at all."
No shit? People are doubting the leaders who have failed after their previous failures? Shocking.
From 350.org today:
We're entering the final days of the climate talks here in Copenhagen. And there's no need to sugar-coat it: the outlook doesn't look good. According to our friends at Climate Interactive, the cumulative result of all the proposals currently on the table would take the world not the 350 ppm that scientists say we need for a habitable planet, but all the way to 770 ppm. As Bill McKibben has been saying, "If that's not literally hell, it will have a similar temperature."
Even perceived "good news" is either premature, or dubious, at best.
Corporate shills, denialists and end of days nujobs have so far very successfully spewed enough nonsense into the ether to widely propagate "seeds of fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) among the public regarding climate change."
HuffPo today:
Privately, government negotiators admit there's no way the negotiations will end with the deal scientists say is necessary for our safety. Indeed, it looks possible that this conference won't deepen and broaden the Kyoto framework, but cripple it.
The HuffPo columnist linked above, Johann Hari of the London Independent, tries to spin things in a positive light, but it's clearly being done with a stiff upper lip.
Yet this conflagration here in Copenhagen is heartbreaking and heartwarming all at once. Our governments are showing their moral bankruptcy - but a genuinely global democratic movement is swelling to make them change course. Mass democratic agitation is the only force that has ever made governments moral before; it will have to do it again.
I support the demonstrations with all the fiber I can muster from the opposite end of the globe. These brave grassroots activists are the same type of heroes that I've been enjoying watching the powerful doc this week on the History Channel, "The People Speak."
However, it seems that more than any time in history to date, the massive uprisings of the citizens are being suppressed, ignored, and distorted by the corporations in charge of the media, and, increasingly, governments.
It's baffling to me that in this country's short history we have seen activism succeed in allowing women's suffrage and giving black Americans the additional 2/5 of personhood, but when it comes to keeping our one and only biosphere inhabitable, we seem determined to do as little as possible until it may well be too late.
There is no planet B.