Month 12, Day 21: Good Night and Good Morning.

The Christian Science Monitor runs another “Cancun isn’t much but it’s more than anyone expected” article. I used it as a hook to rail against the media and the corporatocracy.

I can see the full moon outside but it will be too late for me to see the eclipse tonight. Too bad.

The Cancun agreement marks a modest forward step in the struggle against global climate change, and one which is especially welcome given the overwhelmingly pessimistic predictions made before the conference began. But the forces aligned against realistic action on the complex tangle of environmental and economic issues are enormous. To take just one example, it is folly to imagine that the world’s oil industry is going to support a move away from our crippling dependence on fossil fuels. Equally problematic is the symbiotic relationship between our national news media and the corporate systems which bankroll them. These corporations (and their extraordinarily wealthy executive castes) will not allow the media outlets they control to tell the truth about global warming — because it would negatively impact their quarterly profit margins. And so, instead, we get equivocations, celebrity distractions, he-said-she-said stenography, false equivalences, misleading statistics and outright lies. This would be bad enough if the subject were a normal crisis; for a threat of this magnitude it is a moral catastrophe.

Warren Senders