To begin on a lighter note, I am really going to miss the many ways one can manipulate the word Copenhagen.
The most high profile play-on-words here at the climate summit was probably "Hopenhagen," my favorite was "CopenDeniers" and the one I regret not using was "CopenHanging" to describe Greenpeace's often acrobatic forms of protest.
I don't know what we're all going to do at the next treaty summit in Mexico. Might I humbly suggest "High Mexpectations?"
Sadly we're going to have work on those Mexican word plays because our world leaders have failed us here in Copenhagen and we're going to do this all over again next year. To be sure, many of the leaders of the developing nations fought hard here for a fair deal, but their voices were drowned out by the grandiose political spin of the developed nations.
So today, with no deal in place that will begin to see an immediate reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, I say we should all wallow in gloom and play a good round of the blame game.
A lot of people have dedicated the last two years of their lives in the run up to the Copenhagen summit, away from their families for most of the time and working unbelievably long hours. For these amazing individuals to be anything other than deeply disappointed would be strange.
And with such a massive fail, there's a lot of people to blame. Many blame President Obama and the other developed nations for not being the leaders they need to be on an issue that their countries are almost solely to blame for creating.
I myself blame the fossil fuel industry for their decade-plus campaign to mobilize pseudo-scientists, right wing think tanks and fake grassroots organizations to muddy and confuse the issue of climate change.
So take your pick, it's a healthy exercise in anger management.
But tomorrow we pick up the fight where we left off, because I think if there is anything positive that came out of the Copenhagen treaty process it is that it has created the perfect storm of public awareness and mobilization.
Over the last two weeks, people I know who are aware of the issue of climate change (how could they not with me hanging around), but not really engaged, are talking with a slightly different tone. They are concerned in a way I've never heard before. Now with word leaders in Copenhagen confirming that they are not willing to act on this important issue, I suspect that this tone of concern is only going to grow stronger amongst formerly unengaged citizens.
Couple this shift in public sentiment with an unprecedented convergence of disparate advocacy groups representing billions of members and its a perfect storm.
In the run-up to Copenhagen we saw the mandates of organizations involved in all sorts of causes ranging from human rights to poverty make the issue of climate change their mandate.
Environmental organizations were obviously already whipped into a fervor, so with the addition of their partners from other sectors of civil society, there is now a movement so large that politicians will ignore it at their peril.
The time is ripe for change and while it would have been great to have a deal in Copenhagen, we can instead use it as a launching pad for the final push that will hopefully force leaders to do what we need them to do.
But that can wait until tomorrow.
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Pointing (assigning) blame is utterly useless. The Industrial Revolution is the blame, and can we take that back, or would we want to?
The entire world's economy is driven by Petrochemical products. Virtually everything contains some form of plastic these days, which of course comes from oil. Synthetic material, paint, computer parts, solar panels, cars, buildings, roads, furniture, food packaging, fuel--all depend on oil! The machinery that will create alternative technologies rely on oil. Our global distribution system needs it for fuel. Most U.S. power generation depends on coal, a fossil fuel which can never be made clean (it will waste too much energy to clean it cost effectively). Every tire for every car requires 7-8 barrels of oil to produce-- each tire! Becoming less dependent on oil is a great idea, but it is so imbedded in everything we do, there is no practical alternative available. Steam engines? -- need oil. Hybrid cars?-still need oil.
This is why the "Great Lie" of Cap and Trade has been introduced. We can't feasibly reduce emissions, so we merely let companies pay fines in exchange for "trading" their allowance with companies who pollute less. How ridiculous! Pollution is eliminated, it merely becomes an economic transfer! This is why Third World Countries are so upset. They are being asked to pay for everyone else's pollution, when nothing is actually being reduced!
Like Big Tobacco fought the science link cigarrettes to cancer, the fossil fuel industry has been buying scientists for more than a decade. Both of these are heavily researched facts.
Nowhere have I argued that the industrial revolution was a bad thing, but the campaign to extend the use of dirty fuels now that we know how bad they are for our health, water and climate is criminal
Kevin, may I make so bold as to suggest a couple more?
They were aided and abetted by Mother Natures actions, as admitted to, by an AGW proponent for the same period.
They were aided and abetted by the poor science that produced the 'Hockey stick curve'
They were aided and abetted by NASA crying wolf in 2007 on Arctic sea ice extent, compounded recently on the same subject by none other than Al Gore, only to see significant recovery in the past 2 years.
They were aided and abetted by the Climate change proponents linking hurricanes to AGW. Refuted by both the actual historical data, and, dare I say it, Mother Nature this year! Very shoddy science.
It seems that BIG BAD OIL had some allies.
don't want to lose 'money' or 'power' or their 'monopoly'
In the meantime, I also blame the fossil fuel lobby, along with Archer Daniels Midland at the crucial moments, to divert resources from promising algae- and switch grass-derived ethanol to worthless, energy negative, economically and ecologically unsustainable corn ethanol.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=grass-makes-better-ethanol-than-corn
http://www.grist.org/article/2009-09-22-fossil-fuel-subsidies-dwarf-clean-energy-subsidies-obama-wants
I suggest that environment and health care activists need to work together more, understanding that one issue might be occasionally compromised to the other in Congress, but that overall this gives real Liberal Senators and House Representatives more power to accomplish both policy agendas.
http://www.reedyoung.org/politics/general_welfare/medical_care/2009/12/14/index.html
cross-posted: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/12/15/01515/305
An additional benefit could be that more aggressive horse-trading, using negative incentives against our political opponents, gives voters more insight into who is really trying to accomplish their campaign promises and who is secretly sabotaging the Left. Lieberman is like 80, and we're just now finding out how corrupt he is because his votes never really mattered before, because Liberals never credibly threatened to take away the subsidies from Republicans' corporate sponsors.
AWESOME!