What no Copenhagen summit thread?

[gt3]

Looks like it's gonna be a stitch up:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/08/copenhagen-climate-summit-disarray-danish-text

In other news, bear found sh*tting in woods. (Thought he'd do it whilst both he and the woods were still around).

[Moonlight Shadow]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

I'm quite glad I haven't got any kids and grand-kids, I would not be able to look at them in the eye, on my death bed, when they ask me what did we do to prevent the mess that will take place during their lifetime.

The sheer idiocy and short-termism in this issue generally make me wish our miserable specie dies off without destroying the planet even more...

[Bruno]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

I'm quite glad I haven't got any kids and grand-kids, I would not be able to look at them in the eye, on my death bed, when they ask me what did we do to prevent the mess that will take place during their lifetime.

If I knew my kids would turn out such insensitive turds that they'd start berating me on my deathbed about global warming, I'd probably forgo having them, too.

[Bruno]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

Afterthought- given that humanity couldn't manage to prevent really preventable, seriously deadly shit like WWI & II, the Holocaust and Hiroshima, Bhopal and Chernobyl, Jon and Kate, etc etc, it seems kinda silly to expect we'd all come together on something so massively compliocated and effortful as global greenhouse gas reduction. I'm filing it under 'just one of those things.'

[G-Man]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

Monbiot: Fuck the fucking Canadians

[linus]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

Moonlight shadow wrote:

I'm quite glad I haven't got any kids and grand-kids, I would not be able to look at them in the eye, on my death bed, when they ask me what did we do to prevent the mess that will take place during their lifetime.

Yeah, eyesight is the first thing to go when you start getting really old.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

Copenhagen is an anagram of "Change? Nope!".

[Anton Gramscescu]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

G.Man wants a hyphen wrote:

Monbiot: Fuck the fucking Canadians

You and he are both just jealous of our standard of living.

[Bimbo Bred]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

Antonio Gramsci wrote:

G.Man wants a hyphen wrote:

Monbiot: Fuck the fucking Canadians

You and he are both just jealous of our standard of living.

Yeah. Standard of living. Jealousy. That's obviously what it's all about.

[Anton Gramscescu]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

Bimbo: welcome. Stick around. You may get the hang of the irony/sarcasm/banter thing.

[DCI Harry Batt]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

Alberta's tar sands operation is the world's biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions.

Blimey, and wow, and that.

[Tubby Isaacs]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

Bimbo Bred wrote:

Antonio Gramsci wrote:

G.Man wants a hyphen wrote:

Monbiot: Fuck the fucking Canadians

You and he are both just jealous of our standard of living.

Yeah. Standard of living. Jealousy. That's obviously what it's all about.

I think you can assume it was a joke by AG.

[Ubik]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

Does anyone think the recent email shenanigans at the University of East Anglia will affect the debate at Copenhagen at all?

It seems to be referenced in almost every article about the conference I read at the moment and its alarming that it seems to have undermined public taste for change when change didn't appear very palatable to most people in the first place.

Even if by some miracle of oversight the delegates at Copenhagen manage to reach a positive consensus on policy, public acceptance of initiatives that seek to enforce or encourage lifestyle changes will be made ever harder by those who can now just point to those emails as the basis of an explanation of why climate change doesn't apply to them.

[Anton Gramscescu]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

There's four big issues you need to understand about Canada's record on carbon emissions.

1) We're a large, cold country. Our emissions are going to be higher than just about anywhere else in the world because of it. We spend six months of the year huddling inside and we need ways to heat ourselves - that generally requires burning carbon (some parts of the country are on hydro or nuclear, but not all by any means). For instance, in Saskatoon, where I'm heading tonight, it's minus thirty-three. MINUS FUCKING THIRTY FUCKING THREE. Fuck. At those temperatures, worrying about carbon emissions is a secondary pursuit.

And our industrial centres are a long way from each other. So getting goods from one part of the country to another is a much more energy-consuming process than it is in, say, the UK.

I reckon this is OK - it's just a fact of life in this part of the world. What's important is that we find ways to reduce emissions, but this runs into two problems which are not OK.

2) Some parts of the country are much more energy intensive than others. Now, I don't totally understand how the emissions-counting business works. Seems to me there's as much a case for charging it to the end-user as there is for looking at the actual source (for instance, how much of China's rapid rise in emissions is just an offshoring of carbon emissions for goods that used to be made in the US and are destined for sale in the US as well?). But however it is commonly-reckoned, the bits of the country that make oil produce one fuck of a lot carbon. The oil sands - I don't know if that quote that TonTon has pulled out is accurate or not (and it depends how you define "single source", I suppose) but it's certainly plausible - but even without carbon emissions they are a total environmental nightmare. Getting oil out of tar is an incredibly energy-intensive way of doing it. It requires tremendous amounts of heat and oil - I think I read somewhere that the amount of energy required to get a barrel of oil out of the sands is about 20 times what it takes to get one out of the ground out of a traditional well where the petroleum is liquid. But this is the way the whole world is going as conventional sources run out - as long as the world needs oil, we;re going to have to keep fishing it out of weirder and weirder places using increasingly energy intenesive techniques. Sure, it's out oil sands today...next, it'll be the turn of Venezuela, which has an oil sands field about the same time of ours, but hasn't done any work on it in the last few years as Chavez fired all the engineers who understood the relevant technology back in 2002.

Anyways, the point is, the bits of the country that produce the oil feel that taxing emissions is basically a tax on them (which in a way it is), which strikes them as a bit unfair. And though the rest of the world is not obligated to notice or give a shit about these things, Canada has since the late 60s been a pretty fractious federation and there are real worries that moves towards a green tax could put stress on the federation, bringing regional tensions and even a revival of a separatist threat. We've had a decade or so of relative regional peace and no one is eager to fuck that up right now.

3) Canadians are among the world's largest hypocrites. No, seriously. Our appetite for telling ourselves what a great country we are is enormous (The country's largest book chain has as a slogan "the world needs more Canada". Seriously.) But our appetite for stinginess is pretty big too. The whole climate change thing activates both of these impulses - we want to be seen to be a leader (or at least, more of a leader than the US, which while Bush was in office wasn't hard), but we don't want it to cost us anything. The best way to achieve this is to tell the world we're doing lots of stuff and adopting important targets a la Kyoto but then not actually doing anything. This strategy worked for about a decade. It's only in the last year or two that anyone has found us out.

4) Deep down, most Canadians like the idea of climate change. Maybe our winters won't be so fucking shitty anymore. It's hard to motivate people to fight something that most people, in their hearts, wouldn't mind seeing come about.

[Amor de Cosmos]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

Hmmm dunno about number four, we kind of like out forests out here, and between pine beetle infestations and larger and more frequent summer fires, global warming doesn't seem like a very good idea. Not enough reason for most people to sell the SUV though.

[Anton Gramscescu]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

British Columbians are not allowed an opinion on the subject of climate change until you all agree to stop lording the benefits of your climate over the rest of us between the months of November and April.

[Amor de Cosmos]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

You mean the ones when the basement's flooded?

[matt j]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

We're fucked, is essentially the most positive outlook.

It's just how fucked now.

[Bruno]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

Just talking of the weather, today in Columbus there's a high of 51 and a low of 19. Yowie! It must be some kind of front...the very high winds today might have something to do with it.

[Bruno]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

Oh, in Celsius terms, that's going from nice jogging weather to shattering ice nipples in the space of around 12 hours.

[G-Man]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

The South Africa delegation has said that it will join the falling dominoes that will be set in motion when the US, EU and China don't make the necessary commitments.

[Brandenburger Toro]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

Rogin the Armchair Fan wrote:

Copenhagen is an anagram of "Change? Nope!".

Also, though, of "Change 'n' 'ope"..

[delicatemoth]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

Is there anything the markets can't do?

Selling hot air

[San Bernardhinault]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

So, what's the OTF consensus here. I mean, other than "Jesus, what a pile of useless wankers who couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery, let alone keeping the planet an awful lot more habitable when we know exactly how to do it."

Is the feeling that a fairly pathetic and crappy agreement is better than no agreement at all? Something signed which binds China, India and the US to some sort, any sort, of target?

My first thoughts are: Yes. Just like Kyoto, it's better to have something, to have some more small steps, than to screw it up and just wait a decade until we next try and make a decision, by which time we'll be even more fucked.

But that was a lot of the theory behind Kyoto. It was the first small step on the very long march. To take a decade and then take another pathetic step? Is it actually worthwhile? Isn't it better to call everyone's bluff and get them to actually panic and do something, by having this fail?

I'm still inclined to the former school, but it's not clear cut to me.

The developing countries bloc, by the way, worry me - clearly they are the ones going to be most screwed by climate change, particularly lowland, island and desert countries, but I do wonder how many in that grouping are actually just playing for increased aid, for cash donations from the developed world, rather than for genuine amelioration of the impacts of global warming. Perhaps I'm over cynical, but I have my doubts.

Meanwhile, I find it both interesting and depressing at how increasingly loud and shrill the "skeptics" (denialists, creationists, more like) have become over recent weeks, and how much traction they're getting in the media.

I really fucking hate the fact that the media need to have some "anti" person on, with every story, so when they're covering Copenhagen, they need to say "And not everyone here thinks carbon dioxide is driving global warming" and instead of interviewing policy makers or scientists, they roll out fucking Christopher Monkton or some moronic op-ed journalist from the Midland-Odessa gazette, or something, as if that gives balance to their story, rather than completely and utterly fucking distorting it.

[delicatemoth]

What no Copenhagen summit thread?

It's difficult to see how there can be much will for significant emissions cuts from the powerful nations when these would likely result in unpopular domestic policies - which would doubtless be portrayed by the media as a capitulation to 'less important' countries and the UN. Not much electoral benefit there. Especially when the idea that global warming is a conspiracy cooked up in order to lower people's standard of living is still a mainstream one, hence the fake 'balance' you mention.