The COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference conference in Copenhagen is over and the result is clear: complete and utter failure.
When it was announced that world leaders from well over 100 countries were going to attend the summit I allowed myself to be quite optimistic. Of course it was going to be difficult to get people from all continents and from so many different political systems and political ideologies to work together. Nevertheless I had a naïve hope that this was a common cause that might make people set their other differences aside and do what needed to be done.
As it turns out, I was obviously wrong.
For the first week and a half of the summit we heard nothing concrete about what was going on – only massive amounts of speculation on the part of the Danish media. The international media (CNN, BBC etc.) hardly seemed to know that anything was going on. Even so, what the media seemed to be most concerned with was the fact that leaders from over 100 countries were going to come to Copenhagen, Barack Obama among them. These world leaders ended up arguing a bit back and forth, attending a big state dinner with the Queen, making a long row of speeches, most of which (including Obamas) were full of pretty words but devoid of any real content – and then flying back home in their big private jets.
As impressive as it was to see all these powerful people together in one room – and believe me, I was duly impressed – it was even more despairing to see their non-existent will to action. When a vast majority of experts on a given subject – people who know a lot more about that subject than I do – tell me there is reason to be seriously concerned, I damn well listen to them. Politicians in general seem unable or unwilling to do so. They just don’t seem to understand the severity of the problem. They seem to think that if we just solve the economical crisis we will all be fine (at least in the rich part of the world, but that goes without saying). Well, guess what: when we all plunge over the greenhouse cliff and all our countries – all of them – are hit by floods in one place, drought in another place, all that won’t matter.
One of the few leaders at the summit who actually seemed to grasp the scope of the situation and who made a positive impression on me was Mohammed Nasheed, president of the Maldives; a country that will very likely seize to exist within decades, adding their population of 300,000 to the tens of millions of ‘climate refugees’ that will be roaming the world, making our current economical problems seem like nothing in comparison.
To be fair, the politicians’ hands are of course to a large extent tied by their voters. Even those with noble intentions and those who understand what needs to be done still have to be elected and re-elected in order to do it. China and the United States together represent almost half of the total CO2 emission of the entire planet. In other words, if those two countries won’t play along with the UN and the rest of the international community, what the rest of us do really doesn’t matter. To quote an American friend of a friend – who thinks any talk whatsoever about global warning is just an invention and leftist propaganda:
I’m not suggesting that we not look for alternative fuels or seek scientific solutions, on the contrary we need HONEST efforts to solve our problems. What we don’t need is the creation of a de facto religion based on pseudoscience [by the way, isn’t that pretty much the definition of any religion?] which is then used as means to destroy freedom and drain wealth from the productive. I don’t care if Barack Obama goes to Copenhagen to talk with the other leaders about pollution. I most certainly do care if he mires us in a treaty that damages our economy and/or liberty.
If that in any way comes close to the general opinon of people worldwide (or even just in the developed countries), the future looks very bleak indeed, for our planet and our species…
The Riber Report 