In Bali, US says it won’t be ‘roadblock, then becomes the usual roadblock
Share your Thoughts
Posted on December 10, 2007
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
I swear, it takes strong nerves to address the White House stance on climate change and carbon emissions. Despite magnanimous declarations by the US at the beginning of the UN-sponsored climate conference in Bali, Indonesia, that this country would not be a ‘roadblock’ to an international agreement to sharply reduce the greenhouse gases responsible for global climate change, we are once again, well, a roadblock. Why do they even bother to say these things?
The story as the weekend ends? The US once again refuses to support mandatory cuts in greenhouse gas emissions (U.S. Rejects Mandatory Greenhouse Gas Cuts). We remain in a shrinking, distinct minority of the world.
What’s just as bad is the smugness of the US representative in Bali. If you read the article from CBS that is the link above, you’ll see what I mean. Our crack negotiator over there, Harlan Watson, dismissed the urgent pleas for steep carbon emission reductions from 200 scientists to the negotiators as yet another annoyance, just somebody’s opinion, you know?.
This happened at the same time as the conference participants were applauding the US Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works for doing the very thing the White House refuses to do. They voted for legislation that would cut US emissions from power plants, manufacturing and transport by 70 percent by the year 2050.
Meanwhile, in a style reminiscent of an adolescent who wants his/her own way, Watson reiterated that the Bush administration would not make any commitment until it met again sometime in 2008 with the world’s 16 biggest carbon emitters, a “process” (if one can dignify it with that term) begun earlier this year as a parallel track to the UN-sponsored negotiations. The White House first called this grouping together under pressure from much of the world because of its rejectionist stance towards international cooperation on binding agreements to reduce greenhouse gases.
It is not at all clear how this process connects in any meaningful way with the gathering of 190 countries under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. What is clear is that it is an effort to avoid taking the hard steps required of this society, this economy, if the world is to have a chance to stanch the trend towards runaway global warming.
I just want to reiterate what is a central theme of this blog and its related project — what we are writing about here is not nearly so much a political problem as it is a moral problem, actually, tantamount to a moral crisis. What we are talking about here are decisions, resistances, stalling that have present and latent within them grave harm to the human community and the biosphere of the planet — real death, real suffering, real and irreversible damage.
We are talking about issues that will impact every person alive on the planet, or who will be alive in coming generations.
This is weighty stuff to be taking so cavalierly.
We have got to get these fossil fuel industry people and their allies out of positions of political power. Think of that as you vote for president and Congress this coming year.
I mean it — really, really think about it. I get so tired of hearing what a moral Christian nation we are when an issue like gay marriage, not mentioned or addressed in any way in the gospels, becomes the obsession of the faithful rather than the fate of life on the planet, the welfare of human beings, justice, love of neighbor, blessed are the poor and woe to the rich — you know, all that stuff that is in there.
Technorati Tags: u.s. rejects mandatory carbon emission reductions, Bali climate change conference, united nations framework convention on climate change, harlan watson
Comments
2 Responses to “In Bali, US says it won’t be ‘roadblock, then becomes the usual roadblock”
Leave a Reply
SUPPORT THE INTELLECTUALLY HONEST AND COURAGEOUS WORK OF THE GREAT LEADERS IN BALI
The current scale and rapid growth rate of the global economy cannot be sustained much longer, much less forever, on a planet with the size and make-up of Earth. Many intellectually honest and courageous people possess this knowledge of Earth’s limitations, and are standing up in larger numbers now and speaking out loudly so as to share their understandings with others.
Given the purposes of too many leaders, of course, speaking out in intellectually honest and courageous ways are not examples of human behavior that support these leaders’ pervasively proclaimed view: only we know how to live. Afterall, have you ever heard one of these not-so-great leaders say something like, “Our way of life is non-negotiable. There is no other. It is either our way of life or else…….”?
These leaders hold a monolithic, potentially pernicious view of the way the world works and, consequently, may present themselves in our time as a formidable challenge for humanity. The global challenge presented to humankind by this leadership could be every bit as formidable a global challenge as human-induced global warming.
Here we want to objectively identify an overlooked but primary aspect of the distinctly human-forced predicament that is presented to humanity in these early years of Century XXI. I would like to submit that too many leaders among us, all espousing their insistence upon their one right way to live, present themselves to humanity and to life as we know it as a global challenge.
Through ‘talking heads’ in the media and bought-and-paid-for politicians, super-rich powerbrokers have predominantly established their view about this world and what about it is most important to them. Can they say what they intend more clearly? What more can they say to be better understood? They report their message ubiquitously in the mass media.
These leaders are making themselves crystal clear. They are all about endless economic growth, come what may. For any of them to so much as suggest an alternative to maximal expansion of human consumption, production and propagation activities now threatening to engulf the Earth, would be politically inconvenient, economically inexpedient, socially disagreeable and religiously intolerable.
Nevertheless, it appears worth noting that their “24/7″ message via mass media endorsing unrelenting economic globalization could soon be generally recognized as a scientifically unsupportable fabrication. Their contrived, consensually validated ‘necessity’ for unbridled economic growth could be eventually seen as fraudent as well as an willful exercise of governmental and corporate malfeasence, all of it based upon the selfish interests of a tiny minority of wealthy and powerful people.
These wealth accumulating and power-driven leaders and their not negotiable view of the right way for all human beings to live, I am supposing, will shortly stand out as an ominously looming threat to humanity. One day this threat will be given the attention it deserves. Sometime thereafter, this threat will be acknowledged and addressed in an intellectually honest and courageous way. Then the global threat posed by a small number of people advocating evermore patently unsustainable economic growth, come what may, will be confronted by the family of humanity.
Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
The astonishing failures to act responsibly by too many leaders at the Bali Conference present us the most deplorable situation imaginable. The implications of inaction for the future of our children are potentially profound. How on Earth can the leaders in my not-so-great generation of elders consciously mortgage as well as threaten the very future of coming generations by remaining intransigent in the face of ominously looming, human-induced global challenges, the ones already visible on the far horizon?
Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/