re: #82 freetoken

As some may know, I’ve been following COP17 down in Durban… though the time difference is 10 hours.

Anyway, looking at the various news aggregators and the stories around climate change, the UNFCCC, etc. it appears as the critical mass of idiocracy has arrived. Story after story, but most are full of misstatements, or just wrong data. Besides the expected innumeracy even the basics of journalism, such as verifying sources, is abandoned.

The NGOs are too often on their own ideological wars, and these UNFCCC gatherings are not helping the case of dealing with climate change by giving a platform to those who really want something else than the nominal cause of the meeting.

In that regard this ineffectiveness reflects what is going on between the formal parties. The large nations, all of them, are doing their best to make sure nothing really much gets accomplished.

Which raises the question as to why they all go through this circus to begin with. I suspect that many of the powers that be are in fact afraid that they can’t really control the future of the international system to the extent that would make them feel comfortable. I also suspect that the vagaries of the financial markets has most nations’ leaders skittish. Thus they are not in the mood to do anything other than the status quo, something with which they feel comfort purely through familiarity.

I tweeted a couple of times asking if the UNFCCC has become the League of Nations. Probably most (of the few) who read that didn’t understand to what I was referring. It was simply this: when nations can’t think and act outside of the habits which are ingrained then the ineffectiveness will lead to a resolution that is cataclysmic.

Rock, meet hard place. The Chinese are trying to corner the market on export sales of solar panels with government subsidies (hence the failing manufacturing industry in that market segment in the US). But they are unwilling to commit to not building coal power stations. Same with India. The west should be pushing nukes for baseline power generation world wide, but it’s expensive and takes a long ass time.

It’s a puzzlement.

We’ve had six inches of rain in the last five weeks (Yay!). Our two major reservoirs have come up six and two inches, respectively. No runoff. Everything went to replace soil moisture. Long range patterns predict that the rest of the winter and spring will be dry as toast.

As a global entity, we are slowly killing ourselves.