Profit Pathology and Disposable Planet by Michael Parenti

Some years ago in New England, a group of environmentalists asked a corporate executive how his company (a paper mill) could justify dumping its raw industrial effluent into a nearby river. The river—which had taken Mother Nature centuries to create--was used for drinking water, fishing, boating, and swimming. In just a few years, the paper mill had turned it into a highly toxic open sewer.

The executive shrugged and said that river dumping was the most cost-effective way of removing the mill’s wastes If the company had to absorb the additional expense of having to clean up after itself, it might not be able to maintain its competitive edge and would then have to go out of business or move to a cheaper labor market, resulting in a loss of jobs for the local economy.

Free Market Über Alles

It was a familiar argument: the company had no choice. It was compelled to act that way in a competitive market. The mill was not in the business of protecting the environment but in the business of making a profit, the highest possible profit at the highest possible rate of return. Profit is the name of the game, as business leaders make clear when pressed on the point. The overriding purpose of business is capital accumulation.

To justify its single-minded profiteering, Corporate America promotes the classic laissez-faire theory which claims that the free market---a congestion of unregulated and unbridled enterprises all selfishly pursuing their own ends---is governed by a benign “invisible hand” that miraculously produces optimal outputs for everybody.

The free marketeers have a deep all-abiding faith in laissez-faire for it is a faith that serves them well. It means no government oversight, no being held accountable for the environmental disasters they perpetrate. Like greedy spoiled brats, they repeatedly get bailed out by the government (some free market!) so that they can continue to take irresponsible risks, plunder the land, poison the seas, sicken whole communities, lay waste to entire regions, and pocket obscene profits.

This corporate system of capital accumulation treats the Earth’s life-sustaining resources (arable land, groundwater, wetlands, foliage, forests, fisheries, ocean beds, bays, rivers, air quality) as disposable ingredients presumed to be of limitless supply, to be consumed or toxified at will. As BP has demonstrated so well in the Gulf-of-Mexico catastrophe, considerations of cost weigh so much more heavily than considerations of safety. As one Congressional inquiry concluded: “Time after time, it appears that BP made decisions that increased the risk of a blowout to save the company time or expense.”

Indeed, the function of the transnational corporation is not to promote a healthy ecology but to extract as much marketable value out of the natural world as possible even if it means treating the environment like a septic tank. An ever-expanding corporate capitalism and a fragile finite ecology are on a calamitous collision course, so much so that the support systems of the entire ecosphere---the Earth’s thin skin of fresh air, water, and topsoil---are at risk.

It is not true that the ruling politico-economic interests are in a state of denial about all this. Far worse than denial, they have shown outright antagonism toward those who think our planet is more important than their profits. So they defame environmentalists as “eco-terrorists,” “EPA gestapo,” “Earth day alarmists,” “tree huggers,” and purveyors of “Green hysteria.”

In an enormous departure from free-market ideology, most of the diseconomies of big business are foisted upon the general populace, including the costs of cleaning up toxic wastes, the cost of monitoring production, the cost of disposing of industrial effluence (which composes 40 to 60 percent of the loads treated by taxpayer-supported municipal sewer plants), the cost of developing new water sources (while industry and agribusiness consume 80 percent of the nation’s daily water supply), and the costs of attending to the sickness and disease caused by all the toxicity created. With many of these diseconomies regularly passed on to the government, the private sector then boasts of its superior cost-efficiency over the public sector.

The Superrich Are Different from Us
Isn’t ecological disaster a threat to the health and survival of corporate plutocrats just as it is to us ordinary citizens? We can understand why the corporate rich might want to destroy public housing, public education, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Such cutbacks would bring us closer to a free market society devoid of the publicly-funded “socialistic” human services that the ideological reactionaries detest. And such cuts would not deprive the superrich and their families of anything. The superrich have more than sufficient private wealth to procure whatever services and protections they need for themselves.
But the environment is a different story, is it not? Don’t wealthy reactionaries and their corporate lobbyists inhabit the same polluted planet as everyone else, eat the same chemicalized food, and breathe the same toxified air? In fact, they do not live exactly as everyone else. They experience a different class reality, often residing in places where the air is markedly better than in low and middle income areas. They have access to food that is organically raised and specially transported and prepared.
The nation's toxic dumps and freeways usually are not situated in or near their swank neighborhoods. In fact, the superrich do not live in neighborhoods as such. They usually reside on landed estates with plenty of wooded areas, streams, meadows, and only a few well-monitored access roads. Pesticide sprays are not poured over their trees and gardens. Clear cutting does not desolate their ranches, estates, family forests, lakes, and prime vacation spots.

Still, should they not fear the threat of an ecological apocalypse brought on by global warming? Do they want to see life on Earth, including their own lives, destroyed? In the long run they indeed will be sealing their own doom along with everyone else’s. However, like us all, they live not in the long run but in the here and now. What is now at stake for them is something more proximate and more urgent than global ecology; it is global profits. The fate of the biosphere seems like a remote abstraction compared to the fate of one’s immediate--and enormous--investments.

With their eye on the bottom line, big business leaders know that every dollar a company spends on oddball things like environmental protection is one less dollar in earnings. Moving away from fossil fuels and toward solar, wind, and tidal energy could help avert ecological disaster, but six of the world's ten top industrial corporations are involved primarily in the production of oil, gasoline, and motor vehicles. Fossil fuel pollution brings billions of dollars in returns. Ecologically sustainable forms of production threaten to compromise such profits, the big producers are convinced.

Immediate gain for oneself is a far more compelling consideration than a future loss shared by the general public. Every time you drive your car, you are putting your immediate need to get somewhere ahead of the collective need to avoid poisoning the air we all breath. So with the big players: the social cost of turning a forest into a wasteland weighs little against the immense and immediate profit that comes from harvesting the timber and walking away with a neat bundle of cash. And it can always be rationalized away: there are lots of other forests for people to visit, they don’t need this one; society needs the timber; lumberjacks need the jobs, and so on.

The Future Is Now

Some of the very same scientists and environmentalists who see the ecology crisis as urgent rather annoyingly warn us of a catastrophic climate crisis by “the end of this century.” But that’s some ninety years away when all of us and most of our kids will be dead---which makes global warming a much less urgent issue.

There are other scientists who manage to be even more irritating by warning us of an impending ecological crisis then putting it even further into the future: “We’ll have to stop thinking in terms of eons and start thinking in terms of centuries,” one scientific sage was quoted in the New York Times in 2006. This is supposed to put us on alert? If a global catastrophe is a century or several centuries away, who is going to make the terribly difficult and costly decisions today whose effects will be felt far in the future?

Often we are told to think of our dear grandchildren who will be fully victimized by it all (an appeal usually made in a beseeching tone). But most of the young people I address on college campuses have a hard time imagining the world that their nonexistent grandchildren will be experiencing thirty or forty years hence.

Such appeals should be put to rest. We do not have centuries or generations or even many decades before disaster is upon us. Ecological crisis is not some distant urgency. Most of us alive today probably will not have the luxury of saying “Après moi, le déluge” because we will still be around to experience the catastrophe ourselves. We know this to be true because the ecological crisis is already acting upon us with an accelerated and compounded effect that may soon prove irreversible.

The Profiteering Madness

Sad to say, the environment cannot defend itself. It is up to us to protect it—or what’s left of it. But all the superrich want is to keep transforming living nature into commodities and commodities into dead capital. Impending ecological disasters are of no great moment to the corporate plunderers. Of living nature they have no measure.

Wealth becomes addictive. Fortune whets the appetite for still more fortune. There is no end to the amount of money one might wish to accumulate, driven onward by the auri sacra fames, the cursed hunger for gold. So the money addicts grab more and more for themselves, more than can be spent in a thousand lifetimes of limitless indulgence, driven by what begins to resemble an obsessional pathology, a monomania that blots out every other human consideration.

They are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned about the fate of their fortunes than the fate of humanity, so possessed by their pursuit of profit as to not see the disaster looming ahead. There was a New Yorker cartoon showing a corporate executive standing at a lectern addressing a business meeting with these words: “And so, while the end-of-the-world scenario will be rife with unimaginable horrors, we believe that the pre-end period will be filled with unprecedented opportunities for profit.”

Not such a joke. Years ago I remarked that those who denied the existence of global warming would not change their opinion until the North Pole itself started melting. (I never expected it to actually start dissolving in my lifetime.) Today we are facing an Arctic meltdown that carries horrendous implications for the oceanic gulf streams, coastal water levels, the planet’s entire temperate zone, and world agricultural output.

So how are the captains of industry and finance responding? As we might expect: like monomaniacal profiteers. They hear the music: ca-ching, ca-ching. First, the Arctic melting will open a direct northwest passage between the two great oceans, a dream older than Lewis and Clark. This will make for shorter and more accessible and inexpensive global trade routes. No more having to plod through the Panama Canal or around Cape Horn. Lower transportation costs means more trade and higher profits.

Second, they joyfully note that the melting is opening up vast new oil reserves to drilling. They will be able to drill-baby-drill for more of the same fossil fuel that is causing the very calamity descending upon us. More meltdown means more oil and more profits; such is the mantra of the free marketeers who think the world belongs only to them.

Imagine now that we are all inside one big bus hurtling down a road that is headed for a fatal plunge into a deep ravine. What are our profit addicts doing? They are hustling up and down the aisle, selling us crash cushions and seat belts at exorbitant prices. They planned ahead for this sales opportunity.

We have to get up from our seats, quickly place them under adult supervision, rush the front of the bus, yank the driver away, grab hold of the wheel, slow the bus down, and turn it around. Not easy but maybe still possible. With me it’s a recurrent dream.


Michael Parenti's recent books include: God and His Demons (Prometheus), Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (City Lights); Democracy for the Few, 9th ed. (Wadsworth); The Assassination of Julius Caesar (New Press), Superpatriotism (City Lights), and The Culture Struggle (Seven Stories Press). For further information, visit his website: www.michaelparenti.org.

Climate: Putting People Over Money by Dahr Jamail

Facing climate change, a social movement in El Salvador fights mass flooding and the toxic burning of cane fields.

While debate about whether climate change is real or not continues in the US, the world's leading producer of CO2 emissions per capita, those already living with the effects, like Jose Domingo Cruz in El Salvador, don't have time to debate.

"Our storms are increasing in number and intensity," Cruz, a member of his community Civil Protection Committee that responds to community needs during natural disasters, told Al Jazeera while standing on a levy that ruptured during Tropical Storm Agatha last year. "All of us attribute this to climate change."Burning sugar cane field in the Lower Lempa region of El Salvador for industrial-scale production [Erika Blumenfeld] 

The levy, originally constructed in the aftermath of devastating floods caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1998, now has two huge ruptures in need of repair before the next hurricane season that begins in roughly six months.

A severe drought in 2008 and 2009, and Hurricane Stan in 2005, also took a severe toll on both land and lives in the area. Increasing sea levels will also heavily impact this part of El Salvador, which is largely populated by people who had to flee the US-backed war that raged in the country from 1979 to 1992.

A 2007 climate change study conducted by El Salvador's National Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources focused on the Lower Lempa River and Bay of Jiquilisco areas of the central Pacific coast.

The study found that this area can expect more of what it is already experiencing: increasing minimum and maximum temperatures, a shift in observed seasons, more frequent observations of extremely wet and extremely dry years, and intensified extreme event activity, including tropical storms and hurricanes.

Against the backdrop of these dire predictions, the people are, however, forming a movement that is learning to protect and sustain itself in the increasingly chaotic world of global climate change and its severe ramifications on people, the environment, and local economies.

Social movement as survival mechanism

In addition to climate change, El Salvador faces environmental issues that include deforestation, soil erosion, water pollution, and soil contaminated from decades of cotton and sugar cane production using toxic herbicides and fertilisers.

El Salvador is the 2nd most deforested country in the Western Hemisphere, second only to Haiti. Only two per cent of primary forest that existed 50 years ago remains today.

In response to increasing natural disasters related to climate change - and as an effort to promote environmental protections and sustainable living - a group known as The Mangrove Association was birthed in 1999. Members of the group are primarily subsistence farmers and fisher-folk whose livelihoods depend on the viability of local ecosystems now threatened by climate change and unsustainable farming practises like those practised by the sugar cane industry.

"The sugar-cane industry here now has expanding borders," Estela Hernandez, member of the board of directors of the Mangrove Association, told Al Jazeera. "They are taking more water, and the chemicals they use are making people in nearby communities sick."

Hernandez's group works to support a grassroots coalition of community groups called La Coordinadora, that today includes more than 100 communities. With assistance from EcoViva, a group that enables grassroots leadership in the area by assisting with financial and technical resources, the Mangrove Association functions as a grassroots response to address the crisis causing effects of climate change in this region of El Salvador.

"Local communities are on the front-lines of climate change, and many local organisations like the Mangrove Association are offering the only significant response to this very serious problem," Nathan Weller of EcoViva told Al Jazeera. "Communities like those in the Bay of Jiquilisco can no longer rely solely on the conventional development model to intervene for them. They live the effects of climate change, are working actively on solutions to confront them, and the Mangrove Association serves to catalyse these efforts." 

In what has become a major grassroots social movement that aims to increase diversified sustainable farming, organic foods, food security, and all of this via environmentally friendly methods, many people living in this area are actually seeing their lives improve, despite the challenges.

Yet, the challenges are many, and are not going away.

Dr Anny Argeta is a kidney specialist at the New Dawn clinic in Ciudad Romero.

"There are agricultural chemicals that have been identified as causes of kidney failure," she told Al Jazeera, "Ministry of Health records show one of the leading causes of death in this region is kidney failure."

Hernandez and others in her association and the communities it is tied to are gravely concerned about what they believe is an epidemic of kidney failure in the area. They blame the aerial spraying of chemicals on sugarcane crops.

Other problems arise when the industrial farmers burn the crops, so as to enable easier extraction of the cane.

The deputy mayor of Jiquilisco, Rigoberto Herrera Cruz, provided Al Jazeera with a local government statement that articulated these issues.

"Burning of sugarcane contaminates the air, and our hospitals are showing bronchial and respiratory illnesses, mostly in our children. Use of chemicals on the crops contaminates the soil/water, and this leads to kidney failure, which has been increasing in society and we still don't have an effective treatment to stop this trend."

In addition, his office stated that the destructive method of burning the fields destroys organic material, increases greenhouse gasses, creates an altered micro-climate, reduces subterranean water, and an increase of soil loss and erosion. His office also stated that the salaries of sugarcane workers "are at a level of misery."

"Burning the crops of sugarcane also kills the fauna we are trying to protect," Hernandez added, "And the herbicides these companies use to help their crops mature faster, some of which are prohibited, is washed by the rain into the Mangroves where there are shrimp production pools."

Hernandez and her association work to protect El Salvador's mangrove forests. This is to protect the communities and rich ecosystems there, but also because of the critical role mangroves play in preventing increasing climate change. Mangroves, a saltwater-loving tree, trap carbon emissions and protect the coastline from hurricanes.

"The long-term sequestration of carbon by one square kilometre of mangrove area is equivalent to that occurring in fifty square kilometres of tropical forest," Dr. Emily Pidgeon of Conservation International has said of the value of mangroves in their role in the climate change crisis.

The areas of focus for the Mangrove Association are the Lower Lempa River Estuary and Bay of Jiquilisco. Together they make up El Salvador's largest protected area, which has been recognised as a wetland of world importance under the International Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, in addition to having been designated a UN International Biosphere Reserve. The majority of El Salvador's 26,000 hectares of mangroves exist in these areas.  

By addressing these issues in all their complexities, Hernandez and the Mangrove Association are creating a model that may well one day be used around the world.

A movement with teeth

Alonzo Sosa with the environmental unit of the Mayor's office of the Municipality of Tecoluca is part of the Movement for the Defence of Life and Natural Resources.

"We started this movement two and a half years ago because of the rampant health problems people in our communities were experiencing due to the unsafe farming practises of the industrial farmers, like the sugarcane producers," Sosa told Al Jazeera.

"The chemicals they use, contaminating our water, overuse of land and widespread kidney failure, this is all very serious. So now, we are pushing for better farming practises, trying to eliminate these chemicals and burning, because it damages our biodiversity."

According to Sosa, "It's not just environmental units in local governments that will solve this crisis. We need local governments, journalists, communities, everyone. The only requirement to join our movement is for you to care for the environment and our resources."

Needless to say, the larger producers of sugarcane in El Salvador have not met the movement's requests with open arms.

"The bigger producers are carrying out these atrocious practises, because they are only interested in their own capital and profit," Sosa added, "We are in a constant struggle with the cane operators who desire perpetual expansion."

Antonio Lemus is an environmental lawyer with the University of El Salvador. Five years ago his university signed an agreement with the Mangrove Association to work together with the local communities towards better environmental policies.

After researching the negative impacts the sugar cane industry was having, he said, "We decided to get legally involved, because we're clear that it damages human health, the environment, and these things are impacted on a national scale".

Lemus is using the Ministry of Environment to enforce new environmental regulations, "But big producers and vendors of chemicals are ignoring and violating peoples' health and their right to a healthy environment," he said, "In El Salvador’s environmental law, Article 2, Section B, all people have a right to a healthy and ecologically balanced environment, and this is recognised by the UN."

Article 2, Section C of the same law says: "All economic activities must be carried out in harmony with the environment".

Despite having the law on his side, Lemus said the state does not have overall control of what is happening, so his university has begun working with local municipalities to create a Municipal Ordnance called "The Ordnance for the Protection, Recovery, and Management of Natural Resources and the Environment".

Once this ordnance is ratified, Lemus believes he will be better able to "help people stop this ecological crisis and the ecological crimes being committed in their communities".

Thus, even though there will not be a national mechanism for filing lawsuits, this will exist on a local level so as to enable communities and municipalities to present lawsuits against violators.

Sosa believes these matters are urgent. "We are in a new historical context. If we don’t change how we live, we aren't going to last very long, no matter how much money we have."

Published on Friday, February 18, 2011 by Al Jazeera

 

Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who has been covering the Middle East and Iraq for five years. He has reported from Iraq and is the author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, and The Will To Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. His website is Dahrjamailiraq.com.

Global Warming Is Still There Despite Floods in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales by John Tognolini

It was not a pretty sight when I arrived at Melbourne's Avalon Airport last year and saw a huge billboard of Rupert Murdoch hack, Andrew Bolt looking down on me and my fellow travelers. There are far better ways to be greeted at an airport. I know like many people I can't stand Andrew Bolt but when throws a line out Twitter such as," " Stupid alarmists. When is global warming - I mean global cooling - going to start having negative consequences on this planet?" People have to speak out against this anti science rubbish

Climate Change/Global Warming means more extreme weather, more longer droughts that we've just endured with El Nino and more floods and tempests that we are now going through with La Nina.
Below are some recent information care of David Spratt who wrote and excellent piece on the Queensland Floods in Crikey yesterday.
http://www.crikey.com.au/2011/01/19/emergency-response-needed-for-more-than-floods/

El Nino seen triggering next world warming record
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE70C2ZF20110113
Alister Doyle, Reuters, January 13, 2011
Last year tied with 2005 as the warmest on record, accordin...g to U.S. agencies, but is likely to be overtaken soon by the next year with a strong El Nino weather event.

••••••• 2010 the planet's wettest year and equal hottest
http://www.theage.com.au/environment/2010-the-planets-wettest-year-and-equal-hottest-20110113-19puc.html
The Age, January 14, 2011
Last year was the world's wettest on record, and tied 2005 as the hottest year since record-keeping began in 1880

••••••• Four Degrees and Beyond Special Issue
http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/communication/news-archive/2010/four-degrees-and-beyond-special-issue-journal-–-tyndall-centre-bring
The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research is a major contributor to a specially themed '4 degrees and beyond' edition of the Royal Society’s prestigious journal Philosophical Transactions A.

••••••• Plan B Update: The Great Food Crisis of 2011
http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2011/update90
Lester R. Brown, EPI, January 14, 2011
As the new year begins, the price of wheat is setting an all-time high in the United Kingdom. Food riots are spreading across Algeria. Russia is importing grain to sustain its cattle herds until spring grazing begins. India is wrestling with an 18-percent annual food inflation rate, sparking protests

••••••• Can We Trust Climate Models?
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/can_we_trust_climate_models_increasingly_the_answer_is_yes/2360/
Yale360, 18 January 2011
Increasingly, the Answer is ‘Yes’ Forecasting what the Earth’s climate might look like a century from now has long presented a huge challenge to climate scientists. But better understanding of the climate system, improved observations of the current climate, and rapidly improving computing power are slowly leading to more reliable methods. by michael d. lemonick
 
AND
 
Casting a critical eye on climate models
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20927951.400-casting-a-critical-eye-on-climate-models.html
Anil Ananthaswamy, New Scientist, 17 January 2011
Today's climate models are more sophisticated than ever – but they're still limited by our knowledge of the Earth. So how well do they really work?

Naomi Klein: Addicted to risk [A talk on Climate Change including BP's Gulf Oil Spill]

Days before this talk, journalist Naomi Klein was on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, looking at the catastrophic results of BP's risky pursuit of oil. Our societies have become addicted to extreme risk in finding new energy, new financial instruments and more ... and too often, we're left to clean up a mess afterward. Klein's question: What's the backup plan?

About Naomi Klein

In her latest work, Naomi Klein wonders: What makes our culture so prone to the reckless high-stakes gamble, and why are women so frequently called upon to clean up the mess? Full bio and more links



 Click below to take you to her talk.

http://www.ted.com/talks/naomi_klein_addicted_to_risk.html?awesm=on.ted.com_8qRN&utm_content=awesm-site&utm_medium=on.ted.com-copypaste&utm_source=twitter.com

ABC chair pressures journos on climate change by Renfrey Clarke

Renfrey Clarke

Journalists at the ABC have come under strong pressure from the organisation’s chairperson to give more weight to the views of climate change deniers.

In a speech to 250 programmers, journalists and executives at the ABC’s Sydney headquarters on March 10, chairperson Maurice Newman warned of “group-think” and “a collective censorious approach” in media reporting of climate change.

The issue, he said, was one where “contrary views have not been tolerated, and where those who express them have been labelled and mocked”, the March 12 Australian said. The previous day, the newspaper had said Newman “warned ABC staffers that he would not tolerate anyone suppressing information”.

Newman’s allegations were interpreted as an attack on the integrity and professional judgement of ABC news staff. Journalists at the Sydney meeting rose to their feet to express shock and anger.

A spokesperson for Friends of the ABC later described Newman’s criticisms as “extraordinary and inappropriate”, saying his comments looked to be “an attempt to influence ABC programming to be more favourable to global warming scepticism”.

The ABC, it is fair to say, has a one-person anti-environment pressure group in its top official. A former stockbroker and businessperson, Newman is a friend of former prime minister John Howard, who appointed him in 2007.

Newman claims to be “agnostic” on climate issues, but sources quoted in the Australian describe him as “a passionate climate-change denialist in private”.

His unsubtle message adds to crude pressures on the ABC to report climate questions in a vein that (in the view of mining executives, at least) befits the country that is the world’s number-one coal exporter.

The usual charge leveled against the ABC has been of flagrant green bias on climate issues. Writing in the March 16 Spectator, former Australian opinion editor Tom Switzer argued: “With honourable exceptions, such as Chris Uhlmann, [ABC journalists] actively campaign for an alarmist cause.”

Analysis of the ABC’s reporting, though, reveals a quite different pattern.

Early this year, the ABC followed the herd of the commercial media in failing to debunk the claims of British climate change denier Christopher Monckton during his Australian tour.

Climate writer Clive Hamilton, in a January 28 Crikey.com post, related the dismal story of Monckton’s interview with ABC journalist Fran Kelly: “He compared climate scientists…to the eugenicists of Nazi Germany and to the Soviet scientific fraud Trofim Lysenko….

“Fran Kelly allowed Monckton to present himself as a credible scientific voice, and … did not ask him what his qualifications were.

“She did not ask him why he lied about being a member of the House of Lords, or why he claims to be a Nobel laureate.

“She did not ask him about his preposterous claims to have won the Falklands war or to have invented a cure for Graves’ disease, multiple sclerosis, and HIV.”

On March 11, Crikey.com reported on a Media Monitors count of references to Monckton since the beginning of the year, comparing them with references to renowned US climatologist James Hansen, who at that point was close to the end of his own Australian tour.

Monckton, with training in classics, mathematics and journalism, had received 455 mentions across the media; Hansen, only 21.

For the ABC, the ratio was almost as lopsided. Monckton, the narcissistic crank and impostor, rated 161 references; Hansen, the doyen of US climate scientists, just nine.

If the ABC has any bias on climate change, it is not in the direction alleged. If its journalists are “alarmists”, they practice a rigorous self-censorship.

When Monckton out-references Hansen by 161 to nine in ABC coverage, it is plainly not climate deniers within the organisation who are having to watch where they tread.

The implication that a different “balance” is needed, meanwhile, begs the question: what is to be balanced against what?

Science is not about opinions, but findings that other researchers, through observation and experiment, can reproduce. If the “science” of the denialists can’t meet these criteria, it is not science but speculation and has no place in news reporting.

Where does demanding “balance” in the reporting of science lead? To requiring that evolution be balanced with creationism, modern medicine with leech therapy, and astronomy with the signs of the zodiac?

Newman’s speech and interview, meanwhile, provide insights into the thinking of senior business figures that rely for their “understanding” of climate change on diligent reading of the Murdoch press.

Again and again Newman’s “facts” are plain wrong, as when he maintains that “growing numbers of distinguished scientists [are] challenging the conventional wisdom with alternative theories and peer-reviewed research”.

The last serious effort to pose an alternative, “natural” cause for global warming, Henrik Svensmark’s theory of the effects of cosmic rays on cloud formation, was disproved years ago.

If Newman were merely an ignoramus on climate change, that would not matter, provided he worked to guarantee journalists the ability to gather information freely, and to relay it without pressures or harassment.

But that is not the situation. Instead of defending his staff, Newman is adding to their already substantial problems.

Journalists and the public in general should demand to be rid of him.

From: Comment & Analysis, Green Left Weekly issue #831 24 March 2010.

Climate debate: opinion vs evidence by Stephan Lewandowsky

What exactly is "balance"? Our society rightly strives for balance, and many issues are deservedly considered by presenting a balanced set of opinions.

There are however clear cases in which the only balance that matters is the balance of evidence rather than of opinion: Serial killer Ivan Milat's protestations of innocence should not — and did not — balance the evidence arrayed against him. The desire to cure AIDS with garlic and beetroot does not balance the medical consensus that the disease is caused by HIV and can only be beaten by retroviral drugs. And the current wave of sensationalism and distortion cannot balance the scientific consensus that climate change is real and is caused by human emissions.

The current descent of the climate debate into a cauldron of misrepresentations that are at odds with scientific reality must therefore be of concern.

It must be of concern that climate scientists can be publicly accused of having vested financial interests in their research, when in fact Australian research grants cannot be used to top up a researcher's salary.

It must be of concern when segments of the national media frequently distort and misrepresent scientific articles and scientists' statements in complete departure from accepted standards of journalistic honesty and decency.

It must be of concern when segments of the media echo the meme that "global warming stopped in 1998" when in fact all years since 2000 — that is 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2009 — are among the 10 hottest years ever recorded since 1880. The probability of this happening by chance is small.

It must be of concern that the current Leader of the Opposition has publicly dismissed climate science and instead cosily chats with a visiting British aristocrat who is a serial fabricator — an individual who has publicly misrepresented himself as a member of the House of Lords when he is not; who claims to have cured influenza as well as AIDS; who claims to have won the Falkland War by means of biological weapons; who accuses NASA of blowing up their own research satellites; and whose latest pseudo-mathematical pronouncements about climate change are at odds with past ice age cycles.

It must be of grave concern when the opinions of the same conspiracy theorists who believe that Prince Phillip runs the world's drug trade are given credence by the media when it comes to climate change.

No, balance in media coverage does not arise from adding a falsehood to the truth and dividing by two. Balanced media coverage of science requires recognition of the balance of evidence.

What then is the true balance of evidence on climate change?

Fact is that the most recent survey of thousands of Earth scientists around the world revealed a 97 per cent agreement with the proposition that human activity is a contributor to climate change. This peer-reviewed study clarifies that the present "debate" about climate change is not actually a debate within the relevant scientific community.

Fact is that a recent analysis of nearly 1,000 peer reviewed publications by a prominent historian of science revealed no disagreement with the view that climate change is happening and is caused by human CO2 emissions. If each of those publications were presented on a poster, as is common at scientific conferences, the line of posters would stretch across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and back again. Yes, there are a few dissenting papers that have appeared in refereed journals — but to date none have withstood subsequent scrutiny.

Fact is that there is a strong scientific consensus on climate change and its human-made causes that is exhaustively summarised in the nearly 3,000 pages of the most recent IPCC report that draws on more than 18,000 sources. Tellingly, the lone error about Himalayan glaciers on page 493 of the contribution from Working Group 2 was brought to the public's attention by … an IPCC lead author!

Anyone can experience this scientific consensus hands-on in a few seconds: Google "climate change" and you get nearly 60 million hits. Now go to the menu labelled "more" at the top, pull it down and choose the "scholar" option. 58 million hits disappear. The remaining scientific information will get you in touch with the reality on this planet, in the same way that applying the "scholar" filter after googling "sex" eliminates 500 million porn sites and leaves you with civilised discourse about sexuality.

Does this indubitable scientific consensus guarantee that the evidence concerning climate change is necessarily irrefutable?

No.

As with any other scientific fact, new evidence may come to light that can overturn established theories. Two core principles of science are scepticism and falsifiability — that is, scientific facts must be subject to sceptical examination and they must be refutable in principle. New evidence may overturn the current view that HIV causes AIDS, and new evidence may revise our expectation that gravity will have adverse consequences for those who jump off the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Likewise, new evidence may force a revision of our understanding of climate change.

It is however utterly inconceivable that the current scientific consensus about climate change will be overturned by conspiracy theories that are inversions of reality.

It is utterly inconceivable that the consensus on climate change will be weakened by mendacious misrepresentations in the media that fail to accurately represent the strength of scientific evidence.

It is utterly inconceivable that all the arguments against climate change that have been falsified multiple times will rise from the dead and overturn scientific knowledge.

Instead, the very fact that many of the roughly 100 falsified "sceptic" talking points are continually reiterated in public draws a clear dividing line between healthy scepticism and arrogant denialism.

Sceptics seek answers and scrutinise arguments before accepting the current state of scientific knowledge as fact. Denialists dismiss sound arguments, solid data, and experimental evidence in favour of propositions that have long been shown to be flawed.

The world's pre-eminent scientific journal, Nature, therefore refers to those who cling to long-debunked pseudo-scientific conspiracy theories while dismissing the findings of thousands of peer-reviewed studies by their true label — denialists.

The potentially devastating consequences of denialism are brought into sharp focus by the sad history of South Africa's AIDS policies. Despite having one of the world's highest rates of HIV infections, the government of President Thabo Mbeki went against consensus scientific opinion 10 years ago and declined anti-retroviral drugs, preferring instead to treat AIDS with garlic and beetroot. Politicians even accused a leading South African immunologist of defending Western science and its "racist ideas" for his insistence on scientific treatment methods. According to a recent peer-reviewed Harvard study, this denialism cost the lives of more than 330,000 South Africans.

For that, President Mbeki and his associates are now held in richly deserved contempt around the world.

Precisely the same fate awaits denialists of climate change.

The laws of physics will relentlessly assert themselves, unswayed by public opinion, political shenanigans, or elections. Ultimately, the laws of physics will speak so loudly that no amount of wishful thinking can prevent them from being heard; but because any delay in taking action against climate change will increase the human and financial burden on future generations, it is our responsibility now to cease tolerating lies, misrepresentations, puerile accusations, and conspiracy theories that are unworthy of public discourse in a mature democracy.

Many spirited conversations about climate change can be had that examine the likely consequences for Australia and evaluate the best course of action — but those conversations must be firmly rooted in the core scientific principles of scepticism and falsifiability and they must not be contaminated by ignorance and denialism.

Stephan Lewandowsky is a Winthrop Professor and an Australian Professorial Fellow at the University of Western Australia.

from ABC DRUM

Five Reasons NOT to Invest in Nuclear Power by Robert Alvarez

Yesterday, President Obama announced that the Energy department will provide an $8.3 billion loan guarantee to the Southern Co. for its proposed nuclear power plant near Augusta, GA. "The loan guarantee program for new nuclear power plants not only will further the nation's commitment to clean energy, Obama said, "but also will assist in creating jobs in American communities." Unfortunately, nuclear energy isn't safe or clean and it's too costly for the nation.

Barack Obama speaks about creating new energy jobs. He announced plans to fund two new nuclear power plants. (Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty)News coverage has been mostly supportive and, in some cases, bordering on cheerleading. In his blog for the Atlantic magazine, Editor Daniel Indiviglio laid out "five reasons to cheer Obama's ambition." Let's take a closer look at these "five reasons."

Reason #1: "Nuclear power is a known quantity. The U.S. has been successfully using this energy source for a very long time."

Nuclear power is certainly well known to Wall Street, which despite its recent debacles, has refused to fund power reactors for more than 30 years because of their financial risks. Reactor construction costs climbed as high as 380 percent above expectations during the boom period for nuclear in the 1970s. Nuclear investors eventually wrote off about $17 billion. Consider the 1979 Three Mile Island Accident, in which TMI investors lost about $2 billion in about an hour, when the reactor core started to melt. Nuclear energy has depended primarily on the financial burden being born by the tax payer and rate payer. This is hardly a success story.

Reasons #2 & #3: Semi-Shovel ready, Jobs now -- Jobs later

A new nuclear reactor might provide 800 near-term jobs and as many as 3,500 new construction jobs later. This is comparable to the number of home weatherization jobs created in State of Ohio last year. Unlike energy conservation, in which jobs are created relatively quickly, nuclear reactor construction jobs may take several years to come about.

Reason #4: Probably not very costly

Costs for nuclear power have nearly doubled in the past five years. Currently reactors are estimated to cost about $8 to $10 billion. Moreover, the Congressional Budget Office and the Government Accountability Office estimate these loan guarantees have more than a 50-50 chance of failing -- something Energy Secretary Chu told the news media yesterday he was unaware of before signing off on them. Because of the way the $54.5 billion in loan guarantees are structured, the Federal Financing Bank (otherwise known as the U.S. Treasury) will provide the loans. Guess who will be left holding the bag if things go south?

Reason #5: Preparing for America's Energy future

Assuming that all $54.5 billion in nuclear loan guarantees being sought by Obama are successful -- this will provide less than one percent of the nation's current electrical generating capacity. Replacing the existing fleet of 104 reactors which are expected to shut down by 2056 could cost about $1.4 trillion. Add another $500 billion for a 50% increase above current nuclear generation capacity to make a meaningful impact on reducing carbon emissions. This means the U.S. would have to start bringing a new reactor on line at a rate of once a week to once a month for the next several decades.

Meanwhile, Obama has pulled the rug out from under the nuclear industry by terminating funds for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal site in Nevada. After nearly 30 years of trying, disposal of high-level radioactive waste is proving to be extremely difficult. So Obama has convened a "blue ribbon" panel of experts to go back to the drawing board and recommend what to do two years from now.

The accumulation of spent power-reactor fuel is expected to double at reactor sites and poses new safety issues, which will be the reality for several decades to come. Spent fuel pools currently contain about four times what their original designs envisioned and may be more vulnerable to terrorist attacks than reactors. In 2004, a National Academy of Sciences panel concluded that drainage of water from a spent fuel pond by an act of malice could lead to a catastrophic radiological fire. One thing is certain. Republicans and Democrats do not want to restart a national radioactive waste dump selection process that's guaranteed to anger voters before the 2012 elections and beyond.

Nuclear Energy is an intriguing idea until you start to think about it.

Published on Wednesday, February 17, 2010 by Huffington Post

Nukes Aren't the Answer By ROBERT ALVAREZ

When President Obama rolled out his proposed budget to Congress for the coming year, he said it would build “on the largest investment in clean energy in history.” But Obama’s definition of “clean energy” includes a commitment to help companies garner billions of dollars in loans for nuclear reactor construction. And, unfortunately, nuclear energy isn't safe or clean and it's too costly for the nation.

The government’s role in the energy marketplace is clear in its loan-guarantee programs. This year, the Energy Department proposes to provide $166 billion in federal energy loan guarantees to aid the ailing auto industry and help finance nuclear, coal, and renewable energy projects. Sadly, the nuclear industry is slated to get the largest and riskiest share of that support.

Wall Street has refused to finance nuclear power for more than 30 years, rendering new construction impossible. The Obama administration, in a move to placate Senate Republicans, proposes to fund new power reactors with some $54.5 billion in federal loan guarantees. Because of the way the guarantees are structured, the actual loans will be made by the Federal Financing Bank out of the U.S. Treasury. Last year, the Government Accountability Office estimated that these loans have more than a 50-50 chance of failing. Because of skyrocketing costs, these loans might pay for five reactors and merely expand the nation’s electrical supply by less than 1 percent.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is moving to terminate funds for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal site in Nevada. After nearly 30 years of trying, disposal of high-level radioactive waste is proving to be extremely difficult, so Obama has convened a “blue ribbon” panel of experts to recommend what to do with it. The accumulation of spent power-reactor fuel poses new safety issues, which will be the reality for several decades to come. Spent fuel pools which currently contain about four times what their original designs envisioned are more vulnerable to terrorist attacks than reactors.

In 2004, a National Academy of Sciences panel concluded that drainage of water from a spent fuel pond by an act of malice could lead to a catastrophic radiological fire. A year earlier, my colleagues and I pointed out these risks could be greatly reduced by putting most of the spent reactor fuel into dry, hardened concrete and steel containers as nations like Germany have already done.

Meanwhile, despite Obama’s rhetoric about reshaping America's energy future, he’s asking for a budget that would have the Energy Department continue to spend 10 times more on nuclear weapons than energy conservation.

Even with economic stimulus funding, the department’s actual energy functions comprise only 15 percent of its total budget and continue to take a backseat to propping up the nations’ large and antiquated nuclear weapons infrastructure. In fact, the Energy Department’s proposed budget for the 2011 fiscal year, minus stimulus money, looks a whole lot like it did in the Bush administration, and as it has during several presidents’ tenures.

More than 65 percent of our energy budget covers military nuclear activities and the cleanup of weapons sites. Its single largest expenditure maintains some 9,200 intact nuclear warheads. Even though the department hasn’t built a new nuclear weapon for 20 years, its weapons complex is spending at rates comparable to that during the height of the nuclear arms race in the 1950s.

There’s currently a 15-year backlog of discarded nuclear warheads. Yet, Obama’s proposed budget would halve spending on weapons dismantlement over the next five years. The physical elimination of nuclear weapons continues to have a low priority in Obama administration because it competes for funds to build a new weapons production complex a “holy grail” of the nuclear weapons establishment.

The Energy Department faces a brave new world in which, for the first time, it is being called on to employ millions of Americans to create a new energy future for the United States. It doesn’t appear that the Obama administration will meet this challenge. Instead, more of the nation’s tapped-out treasure is going for costly nuclear power, and nuclear weapons we don’t need and could never use.

Robert Alvarez, an Institute for Policy Studies senior scholar, served as senior policy adviser to the Energy Department's secretary and deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment from 1993 to 1999.

Distributed by Minuteman Media published in CounterPunch 14-2-10

David Spratt: Powerful working towards climate talks disaster

David Spratt

The global community is supposed to be negotiating an agreement to contain greenhouse gas emissions to manageable levels. But with less than two months to the Copenhagen climate change conference, the big players are stuck in an elaborate game of chicken.

Maybe that's the nature of diplomacy, but some have already written off the December meeting's capacity to produce a detailed agreement.

Sir David King and Lord Stern are among many luminaries saying no deal is better than a bad deal, and economist Jeffrey Sachs said in September he fears "a toothless agreement that could be more posturing than progress".

Grist.org columnist David Roberts sees the negotiating process so far as akin to "an aquarium full of hamsters connected to rudimentary motors.

“There’s a lot of frantic running, a lot of sweat and heat, but in the end, very little light", he said in July.

A more significant assessment came from European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso in the Age in September. He warned the "draft text contains some 250 pages: a feast of alternative options, a forest of square brackets ... If we don't sort this out, it risks becoming the longest and most global suicide note in history".

Europe's leading climate scientist, Potsdam Institute Director Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, said the chance of getting a decent deal at this "most important meeting in the history of the human species" is "pie in the sky" because rich countries like the US are unwilling to sign up to ambitious enough targets. "In a sense the US is climate illiterate", he told the September 28 British Telegraph.

From Rio to Copenhagen

The Rio Earth Summit in June 1992 produced the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), with the aim of stabilising greenhouse gas levels at a level that would prevent dangerous climate change.

In contained no mandatory targets or enforcement provisions, but provided for updates ("protocols"). The intent of the Convention was for industrialised nations to stabilise their emissions at the 1990 level by 2000 (which they failed to do).

The UNFCCC has three categories of signatories: Annex 1 comprises 37 industrialised countries (essentially the OECD and Eastern Europe); Annex 2 is a subset of 23 Annex 1 countries, which agreed to help pay for costs of developing nations; and developing nations.

The Convention adopted the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities”, which recognised that the largest share of historical and current global emissions of greenhouse gases originated in developed countries.

It also noted per capita emissions in developing countries are still relatively low, and the share of global emissions originating in developing countries will grow to meet social and development needs. This principle is now under sustained challenge from the Annex 1 bloc, including Australia.

The Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997 and came into force in February 2005. It obligates the Annex 1 nations to cut emissions of six kinds of greenhouse gases by 2012 to 5.2% below the 1990 level (but Australia was allowed an 8% increase by threatening not to sign).

Failure to meet protocol obligations seems cost-free. Canada's obligation in the first commitment period (2005-2012) was to reduce emissions to 6% below the 1990 level. They are now 30% above the 1990 level, but there are no enforceable penalties.

Based on the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the European Union proposed at the Bali climate talks in 2007 a framework that included global emissions peaking in 10–15 years and for developed countries to achieve emissions levels 20–40% below 1990 levels by 2020.

The US (supported by Australia and others) strongly opposed this. In a flood of tears and acrimony, the final Bali session sat through the night to produce a compromise that mandated "deep cuts in global emissions", but no specific figures.

The seeds of the current impasse were planted in Bali and nourished in subsequent negotiations.

Global targets

For two decades climate policy has been focused on policy targets aimed at preventing global warming exceeding 2°C, which is said to be a level of greenhouse gases not exceeding 450 parts per million carbon dioxide equivalent (ppm CO2e).

This is also the case for Copenhagen, but two degrees is a politically-determined goal at odds with the science.

The research tells us that a two-degree warming will initiate large climate feedbacks on land and in the oceans, on sea-ice and mountain glaciers and on the tundra, taking the Earth well past significant tipping points.

Likely impacts include large-scale disintegration of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice-sheets; sea-level rises; the extinction of an estimated 15–40% of plant and animal species; dangerous ocean acidification and widespread drought, desertification and malnutrition in Africa, Australia, Mediterranean Europe, and the western USA.

As Schellnhuber pointed out in the British Guardian in September, on sea levels alone, two degrees is catastrophic: “Two degrees … means sea level rise of 30-40 meters — over maybe a thousand years. Draw a line around your coast — probably not a lot would be left.”

It’s a grand illusion that 2 degrees and 450ppm is a reasonable target — an illusion Copenhagen will not dispel.

Yet an agreement with teeth that would actually limit warming to even two degrees seems most unlikely at Copenhagen.

A new report by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) found the world will warm by 3.5 degrees by century’s end — even if every country enacts all the climate legislation it has promised to enact to date.

Nothing on the negotiating table gets remotely near the figure suggested by Martin Parry of Imperial College London and co-chair of the IPCC’s impacts working group. He told the Independent in January that a two-degree target “would require cuts of 6% per year starting in 2010.”

National responsibilities

A big question is how emissions cuts will be shared between nations. The Bali discussion focused on a 450ppm CO2e target, for which the Annex 1 countries would need to cut emissions by 25–40% below 1990 levels by 2020 and industrialising nations would need to cut their emissions growth below “business-as-usual”.

But the 40% (which Schellnhuber says is a minimum) has been dropped by most developed economies (including the US, the EU and Australia). The European Union is pushing 30% and Japan 25%, but the US won’t go near either.

A second issue is that the Annex 1 countries now demand the large industrialising economies (such as China, Brazil and India) take on obligatory targets. They say these nations represent the fast-growing emissions sector and no longer fit under the Kyoto Protocol’s structure of underdeveloped nations.

China’s actual emissions are now roughly the same as those in the US, but per capita only one-quarter. India’s per capita emissions are less than one-tenth of those in Australia.

These demands have gone down like a lead balloon, especially when those making the demands have themselves failed to put commitments on the table that will go anywhere near two degrees.

Some of the most vulnerable nations, grouped as the Alliance of Small Island States, want global targets for 2020, aimed at “well below 1.5°C” because they understand their countries will simply be submerged or unliveable with the two-degree target.

The 43 island states — about 20% of the UN General Assembly — have advocated stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations “well below 350ppm CO2e”. The least developed countries bloc, which are particularly vulnerable to global warming because they lack capacity to adapt, now also support this demand.

Most of these groups are not keen on carbon offsetting schemes that transfer pollution reduction responsibilities from the high per-capita emitters to underdeveloped nations, because they rightly judge such schemes become a substitute for hard-core cuts in domestic emissions by the Annex 1 nations.

The carbon trading and financial transfers systems — established at Kyoto at the insistence of the US delegation led by Al Gore — and including the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) — worry many people because they act like the sale of indulgences by the medieval church, absolving the buyers for their immoral actions.

But the Europe/US bloc has put carbon trading at the core of its emissions reduction strategy, while the two largest emitters of carbon outside the developed world, China and India, are the main beneficiaries of CDM financing.

Yet in November 2008, the US Government Accounting Office (GAO) found that emissions trading had failed to accomplish its basic objective.

It said, “the use of carbon offsets in a cap-and-trade system can undermine the system's integrity, given that it is not possible to ensure that every credit represents a real, measurable, and long-term reduction in emissions”

It also said, “while proposed reforms may significantly improve the CDM's effectiveness, carbon offsets involve fundamental trade-offs and may not be a reliable long-term approach to climate change mitigation.”

In other words, there are a lot of snouts in the trough that cannot be budged.

The GAO report goes to the heart of the matter: carbon offsets and long-term emission reduction strategies may simply be incompatible.

If further evidence is required, consider that Australia is pushing to redefine the CDM to include so-called “clean coal” carbon storage and sequestration and “efficient” coal-fired power stations.

Other nations like Japan have tried to promote nuclear power as a “clean” technology as a way of diverting funds to prop up their failing nuclear industry.

Where’s the money?

A key component of any deal is money and technology sharing and transfer. Any agreement will depend on how much will be paid to help those without the material capacity to both adapt to global warming and mitigate by building new, low-emissions economies.

Here the negotiations are also bogged down, about the mechanisms, and how much should be on the table. The Kyoto signatories agreed developed countries would provide "new and additional" funds to help "developing countries … particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change in meeting the costs of adaptation to those adverse effects”, but little has materialised.

Australia is yet to commit to funding clean technology to help the poorer countries adapt to climate change, and has joined other developed nations in demanding that developing nations itemise their proposed adaptation actions before discussing what level of climate-aid will be given.

Developing countries have refused, and can rightly point to recent practices such as Australia’s $150 million International Climate Change Adaptation Initiative. Much of the money was never seen by the intended recipient nations, but flowed to the World Bank and other NGOs, leadership programs and research, or was spent domestically in Australia.

Observing the journey to Copenhagen, it’s easy to understand the view of the US’s leading climate scientist, James Hansen.

He told an audience at Stanford University in November last year: “We've reached a point where we have a crisis, an emergency, but people don't know that … There's a big gap between what's understood about global warming by the scientific community and what is known by the public and policymakers.”

In a December interview with Saarbruecker Zeitung Schellnhuber agreed that “we are on our way to a destabilisation of the world climate that has advanced much further than most people or their governments realise”.

What would dispel this doubt would be a clear indication by the major participants that they would negotiate based on what the science tells us we must do, accepting that even those who have conquered the political game in their own nation do not have the capacity to negotiate with the laws of physics and chemistry.

Copenhagen, or more likely a clean-up summit next year, can succeed if the scientific imperatives take centre stage.

We face a climate emergency that requires emergency action. Pretending that the current approach to international negotiations can solve the issue is part of the denial about the climate catastrophe that awaits if the game isn’t played very differently, very, very soon by politicians and people who have the capacity to exhibit truly transformative leadership.

[David Spratt is a co-author of Climate Code Red: the case for emergency action A shorter version of this article first appeared on Newmatilda.com

From: International News, Green Left Weekly issue #817 11 November 2009.