Year 3, Month 6, Day 4: Yo-Ho-Ho And A Bottle Of Domaine de la Romanee-Conti Romanee-Conti Grand Cru!

Well. Who could ever have expected this:

BONN, Germany — U.N. climate talks ran into gridlock Thursday as a widening rift between rich and poor countries risked undoing some advances made last year in the decades-long effort to control carbon emissions that scientists say are overheating the planet.

As so often in the slow-moving negotiations, the session in Bonn bogged down with disputes over technicalities. But at the heart of the discord was the larger issue of how to divide the burden of emissions cuts between developed and developing nations. Developing nations say the industrialized world – responsible for most of the emissions historically – should bear the brunt of the emissions cuts while developed nations want to make sure that fast-growing economies like China and India don’t get off too easy. China is now the world’s top polluter.

“There is a total stalemate,” said Artur Runge-Metzger, the chief negotiator for the European Union.

The negotiations in Bonn were meant to build on a deal struck in December in Durban, South Africa, to create a new global climate pact by 2015 that would make both rich and poor nations rein in emissions caused by the burning of oil and other fossil fuels. But on the next-to-last day of two weeks of talks there was little sign of progress, as different interpretations emerged on what, exactly, was agreed upon last year.

“There is distrust and there is frustration in the atmosphere,” Seyni Nafo, spokesman for a group of African countries, told The Associated Press.

Sociopaths. Sent May 25:

The sickness of America’s economy is uncannily mirrored by the sickness of the planet: the very wealthy and powerful resist regulation, deny responsibility for their actions, and spurn any policies that would impact their profitability.

On Wall Street, unregulated banks gamble money that never existed to begin with, turning to our government to bail out their losses, while at the Bonn climate conference, it’s the nations that triggered global climate change in the first place that are vehemently rejecting the kind of robust, systemic transformation that climate scientists tell us is essential for the survival and prosperity of our species in the coming centuries.

Just as “pirate capitalists” reward themselves for the destruction of our nation’s once vibrantly interdependent economy, great multinational oil corporations reap rich returns while plundering the ecological systems upon which all Earthly life depend. Economic and environmental injustice, it turns out, are one and the same.

Warren Senders