Year 2, Month 11, Day 28: Gooooooood Morning!

Why am I not surprised? USA Today:

As prospects for a major global accord on climate change look dim, ensuring that negotiations continue may be the most a United Nations climate summit will achieve next week.

Beginning Monday in Durban, South Africa, the 12-day U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change picks up where last year’s meeting in Cancun left off.

What eluded negotiators then, and still does today, is a grand bargain in which 194 nations commit to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions that most scientists contend are contributing to a warmer climate.

“Almost everyone agrees that some kind of big deal is unlikely,” says international negotiations expert David Victor of the University of California-San Diego. Economically, he says, “these are dark times and we have made that choice already in past meetings.”

Sheesh. Sent November 24:

In theory, our democratic government is supposed to be ever-active on behalf of the people. But in practice, it looks like America’s political system defines “people” rather more narrowly. Perhaps in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision affirming the “personhood” of corporations, our representatives mistakenly concluded that since corporations are now “people”, ordinary citizens aren’t.

How else to interpret America’s inability to take significant action on the profound threat of climate change? When the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases are “unlikely” to come to any kind of meaningful accord at the upcoming Durban conference, there is only one interpretation: “corporate persons” believe themselves invulnerable to the runaway greenhouse effect scientists say is is now all but inevitable.

Maybe so. If climate change brings an “evolutionary bottleneck” for humanity, Earth may indeed eventually be ruled by mindless, consumption-driven corporate intelligences. Cockroaches, after all, are the ultimate survivors.

Warren Senders