Sunday 6 December 2009

Good Luck Delegates (on yer bike sceptics).

It is the eve of the Copenhagen Climate Change talks. A binding treaty agreed by all countries seems unlikely but we hope for far reaching and accelerating policies from all to stimulate action and protect our environment for future generations.
Ahead of all this has been a catalogue of distractions; e mail leaks discrediting climatologists, a rise of voices sceptical of the influence by mankind on World climate, sloping shoulders, disinformation, exaggeration, politicisation and procrastination! There is a lot to be gained by those with a vested interest in debunking climate change evidence and diluting desired outcomes of the Copenhagen summit, not least the value of their shares.
I clutch my head in anguish as I listen or read the climate change sceptics. They clearly have a personal agenda which is thinly veiled greed. They are old timers, living in the past.
Lets take the atmosphere first.... whether you are a climatologist, a president, a pauper or an apologist, it's there, but it's tiny. How far to Space? About 62miles, an atmosphere 62 miles thick on a planet 8000 miles across, it's tiny. It's thin and delicate and contains all known life. Belch around 80 million tonnes of CO2e into it every day, an unprecedented amount, and it seems to me you're asking for trouble. That's not naivety, that's common sense.
The exploitative nature of energy procurement and use is just SO 20th century! Lets move on. Just as horse power fizzled out in the 19th century, so motor power should have done so in the 20th. Time for better, we move on. The car has reached the limit of it's capability and excellence, at best we can improve on it only by adding another superfluous device, "oh good electric windows", "oh good speed indicator on the windscreen", a breakthrough for mankind, no not really, they're backward steps that each in their small way increase division and inequality.
Time for new and better and hope and action and if we need the excuse of climate change to do it, jolly good. Stop protecting the status quo (no, not the bloody band, although they are of course a world treasure) and protect the environment around you.
Which would you rather have? A giant, smoking concrete stack requiring huge swaths of land to be dug up every day to provide the fuel for them to produce your electricity (not to mention the terrible working conditions for those having to do it) or a slowly revolving propeller gracefully sweeping round? Away with you nimby wind turbine protestors!
Good luck Copenhagen delegates, the World needs you.

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