A Strange Accord

January 18, 2010

On New Year’s Day, the television news shows took us on their predictable tour of the year 2009, featuring the stories and events that they deemed to be the most important to us as Americans. I was interested to see how they would address the climate conference in Copenhagen that had ended two weeks earlier, an event that probably will have the greatest long-term consequence of any other happening of the year.

As they say, it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. All manner of horrendous terrorist acts, attempted mass murders, landslides, political chicanery and the like occurred during the year and specifically during the last two weeks of the year. We all know how painful it is to focus on the problems that confront our world right now. Those people whose calling it is to pay attention to the big potential disasters and who are continually nattering at us to wake up are usually perceived as crashing bores. For good reason. Who can tolerate the anxiety and helplessness generated by something like the planet becoming inhospitable to humans and perhaps doing us in? It’s really too much.

Our world leaders were not able to focus on the subject of climate change while at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as the Copenhagen Summit, and instead reverted to posturing, boasting, threatening and lying during the meeting in Copenhagen, December 7-18. If they had been able to sit down at the table with each other and talk honestly and courageously about the facts of climate change and what we might do about it, we would have been looking at some big changes in our lives as we move into 2010. Not to worry. It’s all still pie in the sky, kind of like your New Year’s resolutions—a nice tidy goal to chat about at cocktail parties and coffee breaks. It’s quite lovely to buy energy-saving light bulbs and to plant a new tree every year, but it’s not going to stop the planet from continuing on the course it is on, a course that does not bode well for humanity.

Barack Obama showed up on the last day of the Copenhagen climate meeting—as presidents are wont to do—and told the world in a press conference after a deal had been reached that the decisions made were an important first step toward climate mitigation. I think the word “deal� is appropriately used. The trouble is that this is the moment when it becomes clear that the planet will not play our games of politics and power struggles. We can have all the meetings we want, come up with all the obfuscatory blather we can muster, but the consequences march on, like Yeats’ rough beast in “The Second Coming.�

I would guess that Obama believes, as he says, that global warming is a threat to the security and economies of the world as well as to the health of the planet. I would guess that he believes the outcome of the Copenhagen conference was a significant first step toward all the nations agreeing on how to deal with climate change. And I’m pretty sure that he doesn’t know how to honestly address planetary change while maintaining what he perceives to be the values and desires of his countrymen regarding comfort of lifestyle and our still lingering belief that we are, and deserve to be, No. 1. He said, in the press conference after the “deal� had been reached, “we’ve renewed our leadership within international climate change negotiations.� He then set forth what all nations should do to mitigate climate change.

They were good ideas, but empty promises. This “deal� is not binding on any of the signatories. It’s a listing of proposals and pledges that cannot be enforced. Furthermore, a number of nations are far ahead of the U.S. in implementing new technology to lessen the effects of climate change and reduce the amount of CO2 released into the environment. Obama cannot make promises regarding what the U.S. Senate will legislate on environmental goals, when and if they get around to discussing the matter. We are the democracy that is currently stuck in the quicksand of bickering and obstruction.

I have an uncomfortable feeling about spending so much time on my computer, trying to find information about the Copenhagen meeting and using so many sheets of paper to copy the empty promises and wordy nothings emitted from the mouths of the seemingly desperate people attending the conference. I have scanned the headlines of the world’s major newspapers on this, the first day of the new year, and found no reference to the recent climate summit. My intention was to try to understand what happened there, but it appears that the subject has dropped out of sight—that there is no matter there. We have tumbled over the edge of our thinking capacity, like Alice in Wonderland.

At the end of the climate meeting, the question of whether we, as human beings, would be able to rise above our politics and act together for the greater good, was answered—with a quiet and predictable, no. Our existing systems can no longer bear the weight of the thinking that is required at this point in our evolution. Our habits of acquiring more and more have become at odds with the planet’s carrying capacity.

It would seem that we are not able to change direction, to countermand the marching instructions that we have given to our leaders. It is in our power, I’m sure of it, if we could just see beyond the restricted vision of what we have been trained to believe is good for us. Even the Pope, who isn’t normally considered a progressive guy, asked us to change our lifestyles in order to save the planet and ensure global peace. He asked the rich nations to shed consumerism. It seems he is the only leader who has the courage to say what everyone knows.

I had no expectations for a positive outcome to the climate conference. I am not surprised or disappointed by the final agreement. Bill McKibben, American environmentalist and founder of 350.org, wrote the following on December 21, 2009, in Yale Environment 360: “If you want to despair, that’s certainly a plausible option. I’d like to go home and sleep for a while. The new world order is going to take a little while to figure out.�

I couldn’t agree more.