What a pompous glad-handing coward. Look at the strangely robotic body language. Obama’s “accord” is go-nowhere hot air and he knows it. Nowhere good–it’s a letter-of-intent for genocide. It must be unprecedented for a world leader to issue such a warrant so calmly, with such technocratic language–it’s such a brazen refusal of responsibility. 10 billion dollars a year in capital transfers for mitigation and adaptation is an insult to the global South, and to the world’s collective intelligence. As the courageous Lumumba quipped, “Ten billion will not buy developing countries’ citizens enough coffins.” Perhaps they’ll economize on size. Children will die first. They’re more vulnerable to malaria and famine.
So to watch Obama jerkily rotating his head, repeating the words his speech-writers drafted for him perhaps 5 hours before the speech (it looks like he hadn’t even read it before delivering it), reminding the world that “our ability to take collective action is in doubt right now,” is infuriating. The notion of “collective action” suggests “collective responsibility.” But who is this collective? Why is “everyone” responsible? The global North’s climate debt—the dollar-amount of over-use of the atmospheric commons, both historical and projected given reasonable reductions in CO2 emissions—is 23 trillion dollars.
Continue reading Obama: World-Killer
Technorati Tags: class war, Copenhagen, disaster, Genocide, Lumumba, Obama
What if instead of asking, what temperature rise, and CO2 slowdown rate, can the world’s capitalist economies endure, you asked, what hard cap on temperature increase would minimize human suffering? You might get an answer like Evo Morales’s:
Bolivian President Evo Morales called on the world leaders to raise their ambitions radically and hold temperature increases over […]
Here’s a profoundly misleading article in the NYT about the crucial fissures that will emerge in Copenhagen. The first?
RICH NATIONS VS. POOR NATIONS
Who should pay whom for what — and how much?
The Bolivias and Chads and Mauritanias of the world argue that they are more vulnerable to changes in temperature, and have little or no resources to adapt […]
I was not even remotely surprised to read that the G20 meeting produced nothing of substance vis-a-vis anthropogenic climate change–colloquially, global warming. Particularly infuriating was that there is still no mechanism for transferring funds to poorer nations to help them adapt to climate change. Adaptation costs used to be estimated at between 40 and 170 billion […]
Rachel Godfrey Wood, a writer about my age who has been writing excellent stuff on the Council on Hemispheric Affairs web-site about Colombia, Ecuador, and the environment, has a piece up about Costa Rica’s much vaunted “greening,” [yea yea that’s a link to my own writing]. I recommend reading it–it encapsulates many of the issues involving […]
