Year 2, Month 4, Day 18: What A Wonderful World

The San Jose Mercury News runs an AP article on the halting, lurching progress of the world’s governments towards some sort of actual, you know, meaningful agreement on climate change:

World stumbles toward climate summit
By DENIS D. GRAY Associated Press

BANGKOK—Nineteen years after the world started to take climate change seriously, delegates from around the globe spent five days talking about what they will talk about at a year-end conference in South Africa. They agreed to talk about their opposing viewpoints.

Delegates from 173 nations did agree that delays in averting global warming merely fast-forward the risk of plunging the world into “catastrophe.” The delegate from Bolivia noted that the international effort, which began with a 1992 U.N. convention, has so far amounted to “throwing water on a forest fire.”

This paper has an anomalous 125-word limit. Sent April 9:

It’s profoundly discouraging. Because the fossil fuel industries regard the threat to their profit margins as more urgent than the threats to human civilization posed by the greenhouse effect, they have successfully used their enormous resources to fund denialism, to sponsor politicians who will propagate a “don’t worry, be happy, keep burning oil” message, and to discredit actual scientific experts on the subject. “Stumbling” is an apt verb; our nation has been rendered almost unconscious by the toxic emissions of Big Oil and Big Coal. As they recover from our century-long carbon bonfire, our descendants will too busy struggling to survive on a newly hostile planet to do more than curse our memories. But curse us they will, unless we find the resolve to act.

Warren Senders