Bali High

Administration belatedly realizes how hated it is, backs off

©Bryan Zepp Jamieson
http://www.mytown.ca/zepp
12/14/07

The big global warming conference in Bali wrapped up last night, and in a last minute burst of activity, managed to cobble together an accord. It’s not a very good accord; it lets criminal regimes like the Putsch junta ignore the growing crisis of climate change for decades and gives India and China enough rope to hang us all, but it’s an accord, none the less.

The agreement is to cut carbon emissions by half by 2050. The US (and Canadian) delegations went home, smiling, to tell their corporate masters that nothing need be done about climate change for 41 years or so and to please feel free to continue turning north America into a impoverished and polluted third-world zone. Their corporate masters, who had no intention of doing anything other than utterly derail the conference, will not be pleased. One wonders if Dick Cheney will snap their necks in mid air, like a displeased Darth Vader did in the first “Star Wars” movie.

At the same time, however, the US, which was booed and hissed and treated with the sort of utter contempt reserved for delegates from Hitler’s Germany, got a hard and sobering lesson: the world is rapidly losing patience with the corporate swine who run roughshod over our lives, and sees them not as leaders who have to fix the messes they have created, but as enemies who must be vanquished if the human race is to continue to enjoy prosperity. Kevin Conrad, delegate from Papua New Guinea, put it bluntly in debate: “We seek your (American) leadership. But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please, get out of the way.”

Up until now it was considered unimaginable that any country would tell the US to “get out of the way.” After all, as THE superpower, America led in everything, from science to athletics to art.

But times have changed, and America has fallen a long way, especially in the past six years. Hagridden with corporate interests contemptuous of the welfare of America, and religious zanies promoting Armageddon, America is a shell. And the world knows it.

Al Gore, at the conference, found himself in the remarkable position of admitting that yes, it was his country that was blocking progress toward a global warming accord. Normally something like that would stir up a lunatic frenzy among the pseudo-patriots of the far right (think Dixie Chicks) but even they were embarrassed into silence by the fact that Al Gore was speaking nothing but the truth, and that the oil-controlled Putsch administration maintained a position held only by oil companies and a handful of crackpots.

Canada didn’t do much better, and escaped much of the abuse the US caught simply because not many people cared what Canada thought. But it’s worth noting that the head member of the Canadian delegation was the former CEO for one of the big extraction companies working in the Athabaska sand pits. Is that a pathetic comment on the Harper government or what?

The Conference abandoned mandatory steps toward halving emissions by 2050, setting that as an amorphous goal, and completely abandoned efforts to have industrialized nations reduce emissions by 20-30% by 2020.

But it’s a step, and the first step of a waiting game. For people who want to say that “half a loaf is better than none,” I’ll say to them that that is a most unfortunate simile, since half-loaves of bread, as any baker can tell you, cook much faster than full loaves. You really want a result from a global warming conference that will let you cook faster?

More conferences are to come, including some hosted by the Putsch junta (which was only barely spared the humiliation of having the entire world boycott a “World Conference” next year), and everyone’s waiting to see if Americans can get their act together and elect an administration that is more than just a bellicose and cowardly pack of oil company whores.

If America (and Canada) can throw off the suffocating corporate domination of their governments, then the world can move forward.

There’s a sense of urgency that wasn’t there a year ago. A lot of people were horrified by the dramatic melt-back of the arctic sea ice this past fall, and while nobody knows if it was a result of global warming or just an anomalous year, it caused a lot of people who hadn’t quite decided if they “believed” in global warming or not to decide that there really is something to it.

In the meantime, we need to figure out reasonably fair ways of sharing the onus for cleaning up our act. It’s one thing to point at China and India and declare that they are a big part of the problem, quite another to ignore the fact that their CO2 emissions, on a per capita basis, are a tiny fraction of those kicked out by your average north American. An Indian or Chinese individual can’t be expected to reduce emissions as much as an American when his total output now is less than what the American is being asked to reduce his by. In the meantime, countries that don’t finish in the top 100 in terms of C02 emissions by country are in reality quite profligate. The average person in the United Arab Emirates creates four or five times the amount of CO2 as the average American.

It isn’t enough that industrialized nations should develop the technology and materials to produce clean, safe, green power. They must be willing to give this technology and materials to the third world. That’s the REAL sacrifice the industrialized world will have to make. If, for example, Honda really does have a viable fuel-cell hydrogen car, then they need to make the technology and science needed to build such cars available to the Chinese and the Indians. And consumers in the west will have to refrain from whining about how they have to pay for the technology that the Chinese are being given, because it makes more sense that those who CAN pay to solve a world problem must, in order to make it possible to actually solve the problem. America won’t benefit if everyone here is driving zero-emission vehicles, but within the next 20 years China will have 700,000,000 gasoline-burning cars on the road. American climate and ocean tides will change just as dramatically as China’s, and whatever sacrifices America made to clean up will have been in vain.

Perhaps next year, the pack ice will go back to less terrifying levels, and we can all heave a sigh of relief, knowing it was just an odd year and not a crucial tipping point. Maybe America and Canada can get rid of the corporate whores and replace them with leaders who put humanity ahead of their own personal greed. And then, maybe, humanity will have a little wriggle room to further discuss and address the issue of global warming. Who knows? Maybe they’ll even take advantage of that.

But global warming isn’t going away, and no matter how much the brave leaders of American industry whine that having to convert to clean and efficient industry will ruin them, the costs of NOT doing so will be far higher.

All Bali did, really, was buy us one more shot at a last chance.