Bali Talks
It appears as if the entire constellation of those who’ve got a stake in addressing the climate change crisis have descended on Bali over the course of the last ten days. The conference wraps up tomorrow. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the U.S. has reiterated the Bush administration’s adamant opposition to mandatory GHG reductions. (See No Surprises (Unfortunately) from last week. The headline today from Reuters was EU accuses U.S. of blocking climate talks. The White House has called a meeting of 17 of the world’s top emitters, including China, Russia and India, in Hawaii late next month to discuss long-term curbs on greenhouse gases. This follows on the nearly universally decried meetings the Bush administration hosted in Washington in September. (See More Climate Change Talks.) The feeling of one leading delegate in Bali, Humberto Rosa, Portugal’s Secretary of State for Environment, was “If we would have a failure in Bali it would be meaningless to have a major economies’ meeting in the United States.”
Reuters further notes Al Gore lays blame for Bali stalemate on U.S. Gore said: “I am going to speak an inconvenient truth. My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress in Bali.” Ouch. You can see a clip from Gore’s speech here.
It’s a further inconvenient truth, I’m afraid, but we’re going to have to wait until January 20, 2009 to have the U.S. government get down to rolling up its sleeves in this. See my predictions for next year and beyond at the new “Year in Review” page here at the blog.
December 15th, 2007 at 11:10 am
Other than the fact that the Bali Summit provided nothing other than to agree to agree to further climate talks (and that’s all that it was), it provided absolutely no change in stopping the constantly increasing global pollution and the life-threatening build up of carbon dioxide. Climate change added to the world’s emerging and dire problems (population explosion and its sustainability, famine and food shortage, energy resource depletion and increased energy demands, cyclic pandemics, global pollution and carbon dioxide saturation, dwindling water shortages for life etc, etc, etc), put together are immense. Indeed together, they are a recipe of nightmarish proportions that has never been seen before by humankind. But the greatest threat to human stability is the fact that people in high places do not realize that the time-span for solving these huge global problems has a finite period of time also. The writing is now on the wall I would say for all to see if they will only look and where humanity has to react without delay, but where, reaction to global problems takes decades to solve. Therefore the lead-time that we have now is the only thing that we have in our favour. Leave it for another 20-years and we shall not have the necessary lead-time to do anything about the really ‘big’ problems. This is what we really have to get over to our leaders, politicians and multinational industrialists, for it will affect them as much as it will affect you and me. Indeed, if they do not change quickly there self-preservation and vested interest thinking, we shall all end up with problems that are just unsolvable due to the time-served requirement to solve them and where time will literally run out on us all.
For only by people in high places realizing our dilemmas quickly now will be able to confront them and have enough time to solve them. It is no use therefore in pussy footing around until it is too late. For hesitancy and delay today is the greatest threat to the survival of humankind and where if we do not come to our senses quickly, in fifty-years time, the world will have become very similar to most probably how we can picture in our minds, a world very much like hell itself.
Dr David Hill
World Innovation Foundation
Bern. Switzerland