Oh, What A Tangled Web
Well, climate change is a reality. Whether the reasons for it's alterations between cooling and heating can be attributed to gradual, normal cyclical changes imprinted over time in nature, or whether solar activity is involved, or whether either or both of these have been helped along by human activities there is cause for some concern. We don't know - no one really can, aside from fairly pessimistic theorists - what is truly transpiring, and what the end result will be.It certainly doesn't help much when the foremost and most influential/notorious advocate of global warming (which, in fact, may not be occurring, despite other calamitous environment-changing events on the horizon, including global cooling) keeps coming front and centre and forwarding erroneous 'facts' as indisputable. Al Gore's recent correction by the climatologist whose work he cited as proof of imminent melt-disaster a case in point.
And when we have British royalty delivering another crisis message of assured and accurate dimensions such as: "The grim reality is that our planet has reached a point of crisis and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control", simply points out the level of unhelpful hysteria that leads to generally level-headed personages uttering unprovable statements.
The bickering among those assigned by their countries, all 193 of them, about cause and effect, responsibility and blame, advances nothing but resentment on all fronts. That the G77 chose to have themselves represented by Sudan, a country whose genocidal fury against its own is escalating as it attempts to preserve and protect its vast oil holdings, tells us something about the collective judgement of developing and particularly African countries.
And there is a clear dissonance between genuine concerns over the environmental trajectory of change, and those using it as a screen to finagle 'guilt money' over historical colonial, and technological-advance transgressions from developed countries to hand over yet greater obligatory sums of conscience-assuaging money to further fuel United Nations' missions' payrolls and fatten Swiss bank accounts of all those kleptocracies.
When the UN Climate Change Conference confers equal status on the arrival of such luminaries as Great Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, Liberty's balance surely tilts close to collapse. Canada, on the other hand, remains the very living symbol of recalcitrance and unco-operativeness on the world stage, a blemished state of stubborn denial.
Canada's economy is tied in lock-step to that of its neighbour and largest trading partner with whom it has completely interrelated manufacturing practises and energy grids. Its government sensibly insists on tying in its responses to that of the United States, since whatever that country does inevitably impacts on Canada. And, in fact, Canada's position does echo that of the United States.
Its decision to impose a national technology fund where greenhouse gas emitters pay when their target emissions are exceeded is also eminently sensible, since this will fund badly-needed technology-ameliorating research. The purchase of 'offsets' under a cap-and-trade scheme is an energy-solution sham, supporting a new industry happy to get off the ground, making money for entrepreneurs.
Focus must be placed where it is due, if it is due. On those countries of the world intent on sacrificing their ecologies and their futures through the destruction of their rain forests, for example. And the outraged tiffs between the world's two largest environmental polluters over who is more to blame, and who should be committing to the commission of economic suicide remains an unremarked side-note.
A total sophomoric exercise in disharmony. Augmented hysterically by the activities of the NGOs and their committed followers.
Labels: Environment, United Nations, World Crises
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, December 16, 2009
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