Hu Tells Howard To Piss Up Rope - Climate Discussions Must Go Through UN - Der Spiegel

[hatrack]

As Australian diplomats try to use the forum of the APEC meeting in Sydney to bring about a statement on climate change with "aspirational" targets, China is denying them the opportunity to grab the limelight. Beijing is insisting that the United Nations is the best forum for discussing climate change and that the Sydney meeting should focus on trade-related issues.

A draft statement set for approval by the 21 ministers attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting will formally put climate change on the meeting's agenda for the first time. In an earlier statement, the ministers agreed that issue was of "vital interest." But whether this later statement will amount to anything more than a "Please refer to UN" is yet to be seen.

The final wording of the document has been the flashpoint for disagreement on whether it should include any hard numbers in its suggested targets for lowering green-house gas emissions, thought to be a significant factor behind climate change. The final document, dubbed in advance the "Sydney Declaration," is scheduled to be released over the weekend.

"We very much hope that this Sydney Declaration will give full expression to the position that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change would remain the main channel for international efforts to tackle climate change," China's President Hu Jintao told a press conference after meeting with Australian Prime Minister John Howard.

EDIT

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,504265,00.html

[rosesaylavee]

1. Climate Change WILL effect trade

Why wouldn't they discuss this at APEC.

[hatrack]

2. Well, it's "not their job", you see. Just like the BBC. Just like the Republican Party.

Lots of "not my job" going around these days.

[rosesaylavee]

3. Pretty sure that Gore will be there

hopefully he will be able to persuade them that its in their best interests to consider how their trade practices NOW are effecting their trade revenues in the future.

[GliderGuider]

4. Well, I'm sure "somebody" will look after it eventually, right?

If we all just stick to our knitting and keep our noses out of other peoples' business, things will turn out just fine. After all, dealing with Climate Chaos, Peak Oil and Environmental Collapse must be somebody's job - it's too important for them not to have assigned someone to look after it. No need for us to do anything...

'Scuse me, I have to go take my blood pressure meds.

[rosesaylavee]

5. I know

Bet there is no one from the govt here attending... no one to strong arm or threaten or even allude to trade embargos if they don't move forward on this issue.

This is why it is imperative the next POTUS has to understand the nature of this crisis and be prepared to move on it 1/21/09.

[GliderGuider]

6. I hate to say this, but "the nature of the crisis"

is so far beyond imagining that there is literally no chance that a POTUS or any other significant national leader will ever move on it in any substantive way. The best they will be able to do is nibble around the edges, make it it look like they're doing something, and pray they will have the time to leave the mess to the next guy.

Seriously, if people at large knew how bad the global ecology/energy/economy problem is and how close we are to having it kick our species' collective butt into the dustbin of geological history, there would be revolutions. Big, nasty French style revolutions with tumbrils in the streets carrying corporate CEOs to their last appointment with the guillotine.

I've had three years to get used to knowing how bad the situation really is, and even after a spiritual/philosophical transformation I still wake up at 3:00 am from the sweats and nightmares.

[rosesaylavee]

7. Right there with you.

Not sure what the solution is - if we can't convince our govt leaders to actually lead, and our efforts are too small scale to make a significant difference, what else is there?

Gore has called for civil disobedience. But that requires leadership to pull off... and who is leading? Damn. I know this sounds ineffectual but I am very frustrated about this too. The only answer I can see to the whole thing is if Gore would decide to run. I think having someone of that magnitude and knowledge of what the stakes are is about the only way to keep the species on the planet.

[The2ndWheel]

8. If anything, I'd say small scale would help

The problem with that being that if anyone, anywhere, at anytime, did anything large scale, they would run over those it the way. So we end up having to go large scale with our efforts, to combat the problems that large scale efforts created. Guess what we'll have to do after that doesn't fix the problem.

Bigger and better is killing us. No, actually, it's killing the conditions we live in. It has been for a couple thousand years. The only reason we've been able to push those problems off into the future at every turn is that we've figured out ways of sucking more energy from further and further away. All that, like I said, has required us to figure out ways of sucking more energy from further and further away.

If there were more small scale efforts(which would mean that everyone can't have everything all the time), we would have the same problems we do today, but on a smaller scale. Yes, no matter what we do, we're not getting out alive.

[GliderGuider]

9. Oh, the species will stay on the planet for the foreseeable future

We may be like yeast, but we're also like cockroaches. It would be really hard to kill all of us. What will not survive is our current global civilization.

Political leadership can't be part of the solution, because politics (as exemplified in all political structures currently in existence regardless of their stated ideology) is, at its core, part of the problem. No human systems that encode power relationships and are driven by relative advantage can solve the problem, because any possible solution entails voluntarily disadvantaging yourself or your group. The Prisoner's Dilemma and 15,000 years of history says this is not within our grasp, either practically or theoretically.

The structures of our civilization have been carefully crafted to support a emergent, global, zero-sum paradigm of continual growth, competition, exploitation, hierarchy and the rejection of limits. They have been so cunningly constructed to appeal to our reptilian, limbic and neo-cortical brains that it is literally impossible for most people to think of social systems that don't embody their attributes. Because we accept those values we reinforce and empower the aspects of our social structures that support them, thereby creating an iron-clad feedback loop. The loop is closed by our communicators who channel the values back to us throughout our lives - the media and think-tanks of course, but more importantly the educational systems that embed our values as very young children and continually reinforce them throughout our most formative years.

With these political, economic and educational structures in place there is no chance that a revolution of consciousness can take place on the scale that would be required to cope with a crisis of this magnitude. Even small scale experiments, like the communes and free speech radicals of the late '60s, are consistently marginalized, co-opted or suppressed. The only chance humanity has is if the destruction wrought by our passage through the bottleneck strips away this accretion of rigid social exoskeleton and gives the soft animal inside a chance to grow into a different form.

That's how I see it, anyway.