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t-pini•n: Corporations 1 — 0 Copenhagen (CO2 390 ppm)Dec 25 '09 Write an essay on this topic.
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The Bottom Line The Corporations want dough, the SUVs must go, oil must flow, so climate change can just blow.
So, Obama got his Nobel, & has already vindicated the naïve Norwegians by saving the world. All it took was for him to breeze into Copenhagen, have a couple of chinwags with the Chinese, pull an all-nighter to slog out an essay, get the eager imprimaturs of some nations itching to take the high (carbon-intensive growth) road (Brazil & India) to give the Copenhagen Accord some semblance of consensus, announce the "deal" live so US breakfast show audiences would get the news before most of the COP15 delegates, & fly home in time for organic Christmas turkey. Just one small step for (a) man; one giant carbon footprint for Humankind. The spin machine has been kick-started to ram the Accord up the world's you-know-what (rhymes with crass) as an "essential beginning." If Copenhagen is the beginning, one wonders what Rio, Kyoto, Bali, Montreal, etc. were. After all the hyped up expectations for COP15, some countries needed a face-saving foolscap to wave around as an accomplishment. Thom Yorke was right to fear they would "pretend that something has happened when it hasn't" (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8419641.stm). There's no doubt something has to happen. At the Bright Green expo (http://www.brightgreen.dk/), Dr. Pachauri, the IPCC Chairperson, stated even if we manage to limit global temperature rise to 2ºC, inertia would still have significant impact. The simple physical expansion of water would lead to a 0.4-1.4m sea level rise. On top of this comes the additional rise due to polar ice melt. What does this mean? It means goodbye to several Pacific nations. It means goodbye to the Maldives. It means goodbye coastal Bangladesh. It means hello millions of climate refugees. It means boat people on swollen oceans, unwanted climate gypsies with no land to call home. So why hasn't something happened? Well, as the world is creeping out of financial woes, the nattering knaves & nabobs tried to negotiate a knockout to an international Gordian knot with narrow-minded nearsighted notions. Who can dare alienate a voter bank weaned on cheap fuel, now? The truth is that you & I & thousands like us sprouting into environmental Mother Teresas would have minimal impact on emissions. If several global corporations truly embraced responsible emissions policies not just for the sake of greening their image or polishing up their CSR, now that would be significant. Corporations have the world leaders in their right-hand pockets, & aren't ready to allow their puppets to pass binding legislation that could affect shareholder returns. During the financial meltdown, walls of nationalism shot up almost as fast as corporate testicles shrank into scrotums at the fear of those bounteous billions in bonuses fading forever. Now they've bailed out those corporations, leaders' survival hinge on ensuring economic revival, and it sure isn't mom-and-pop stores they're turning to. Dangling the danger of mass unemployment, corporations can easily insist on their god-given right to pollute as much as they wish in order to grease the gears of industrial growth. With great power comes great responsibility to hang on to that power, and only true leaders can resist that responsibility. Anyone climbing out of corporate pockets is just crawling under corporate bed sheets. No limits to growth was their order of the day, & world leaders were just waiters to serve, lip-synching their way through Copenhagen. The Corporations want dough, the SUVs must go, oil must flow, so climate change can just blow. When it comes to setting climate change agenda, size does matter - the countries with economic muscle call the shots. The weak, the poor, and the marginalized have even less voice in this process than the amount they have contributed to the problem. Yet they are the most affected. This glaring injustice is why common people with some vestiges of conscience march at climate protests. But it isn't the common people determining justice in this world. Those who do, why, they're in the corporations' left-hand pockets. So we've come to a position where the worst polluters (& polluters-to-be) set the course of global response to climate change. We might as well save some money & have robbers & rapists & reality TV show producers get together & negotiate their sentences themselves. What was the point of hauling hundreds of leaders & thousands of delegates into Copenhagen? Couldn't Barack just have landed in China to kibitz with Wen over fortune cookies & green tea? They could've come out with a Shanghai Communiqué just as toothless as the Copenhagen one, but saved a cool $200 mill (estimated) in the bargain. (The carbon impact of this trip could've been offset, culturally, by commissioning an Obama in China opera by John Adams - Michelle would be fine as Pat, & Hillary would be a dead ringer for the he-man hulk of Henry.) We're asked to mitigate climate change so we can leave behind a decent world for future generations. Too late: the future is bullish on iPods but bearish on whale pods. In our corporate-choreographed capitalistic consumerist pursuit of modern conveniences, we've already sold our kids down the river. In 2050, one of the more literate of them will broadcast on their version of Twitter: Dem 2009 fkrs, dey rly suk. We can only hope their grasp of history will be even more tenuous than ours, so that they never realize exactly how big fkrs we really were. Following Dr. Pachauri (who had followed US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu) at Bright Green was Bernard Tunim, the chief of the island of Tulun (Carterets) off Papua New Guinea. His people are among those for whom climate change is a daily issue - their islands are sinking (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMhPH7R9vX4) & their people starving (however, climate change naysayers please note this may be due to subsidence rather than GW). He ended his speech on 20091213 with an affirmation of hope that something can still be done for his people. It's conceivable that corporate CEOs have families, children of their own, so perhaps at some miniscule level they'd be able to empathize with Tunim and his children. But Corporations don't have children. Come to think of it, they're not even living. Copenhagen was all decked out for COP15. There were posters & flyers throughout the city rebranding it as Hopenhagen. The outcome of COP15 shows Nopenhagen would've been more appropriate; one would hope COP16 in Mexico City 2010 doesn't turn out to be Nexico. (As usual, tipu has no idea what he's talking about; don't take any of this seriously).  |
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