The little mermaid of copenhagen will watch sea levels rising and say precisely ntohing about it.

Whatever the reasons for Global Warming, whether it’s cyclical or whether it’s all our fault for pumping the atmosphere with CO2 and upsetting the equilibrium, it really doesn’t matter. Chances are that it’s coming with a vengeance. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.

Up until now, the world has talked a good game about “stopping”, “slowing” or “reversing” climate change. But it’s all just hot air. Unless the human race is prepared to make monumental sacrifices that change the course of history in a matter of decades, we’re not going to have any effect. And the chances are very slim that the Chinese, Indians or even the Prius driving Americans will do even 5% of what’s necessary. President Obama’s last trip to Copenhagen to shill for his home town’s Olympic bid was a big disappointment. He’s not going to risk political capital to show up in the Danish capital for a second time in a year to give the headline writers a chance to say “Copenhagen is where President Obama goes to fail”

I’m sure in his private thoughts, Obama, along with Al Gore for that matter know the truth. The train has left the station. Global warming is unstoppable. But that’s not something you can trumpet from the rooftops without making the human race, well, hate you. For example, Obama has virtually trademarked the word “hope”, so he’s hardly going to start telling the truth anytime soon.

Unfortunately, all that hope is misdirected and might be damaging our long-term future. Because instead of concentrating on how to “contain” and “manage” global warming, we’re focusing on beating it. That’s a mistake. Sure, green energy is good, but we also need to creating techniques to mitigate global warming’s coming effects, or agriculture, on cities, on whole nations. What are we going to do about the likely flood of climate refugees? What about flooding? Are we going to develop a mechanism so the world can share rather than hoard scarce resources?

By accepting that global warming is coming, we can bypass the First world against Developing Country blame game which is getting us nowhere. Lowering emissions would be very nice, but it’s not going to happen before its too late – which is when everyone will think it’s a swell idea.

So let’s get back to what we can actually do. The first step would be to accept the blame for Global Warming. It’s a fact that it’s our fault in the West. No getting around that. We made a big boo-boo and really damaged mankind. We need to wear a dunce cap for having started that silly industrial revolution and need to deliver a big posthumous slap on wrist for the dudes who invested the steam engine. Easy to say, and totally meaningless.

What’s really important is that everyone’s going to suffer whether they do something or not. Ultimately, America and Europe will do what they have to mitigate the effects of climate change for themselves, and for client states that they help to protect. If China or India want to ignore the future, that’s their business. The truth is that they’re not going to do anything meaningful anyway, so they’re on their own. No fair. No foul.

Of course, it would be nice if we could all get along so how about President Obama calling for the creation of an international center to forecast effects of global warming across the globe, and to recommend ways to combat those effects. That will help create a focus on management and containment, rather than the rather pathetic “we can beat this thing” call that’s going to lead to mankind’s biggest disappointment.

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So here’s a suggestion. Whatever the reasons, human or not, let’s change our approach to this – to damage limitation. Let’s accept that global warming is an inevitability, and shore up and defend what we have – not for our good, but for the good of future generations. Part of that defence is not to add to the problem by developing green energy solutions and building a new infrastructure, as well as finding ways to adapt to that change, in agriculture’ energy’ industry and society.

But were wasting valuable time and creative energy pretending we can stop it. We can’t and we won’t. All we can do is manage it.

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hope y'all like swimming

Let’s start with a little history of something totally unrelated. Cigarettes.

Smoking and global warming have very little in common, except this. They both show that human beings are not too great at getting a message. It was in the early sixties that a definitive link was made between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer. And yet here we are forty-five years later with people dying in their droves the world over. Sure, communication is better than ever, as are the scare tactics, let alone the evidence, but cigarettes are still a very profitable business.

There’s only one reason for that, and it can be summed up in a few very simple words. “It ain’t gonna happen to me”.  Humans are eternal optimists. Half a million people a year are dying of smoking-related diseases each year. But it ain’t gonna happen to little old me. Right.

Now let’s take global warming. For years a vast preponderance of experts have been telling us that global warming is coming. Only a few days ago, the Intergovernmental Panel and Climate Change (IPCC) said that they’d got it wrong in their earlier reports which they pretty much said were politically watered-down to make their recommendations even remotely workable. Turns out that they’d figured we’d be more energy efficient by now, and stop with our coal addiction. But efficiencies flattened out and coal is now the fossil fuel du jour for China and India. Their forecasts for serious global warming just got way more dire.

Sadly, there is nothing the IPCC could say that will make more than a tiny dent in the problem. The train has left the station, and we’re on a one way ticket to Palookaville. Not enough. The ice-caps are melting. Eah, heard that one before. The Maldives are one big puddle. The what-dives?  Sure we’d all like to see global warming put back in the box of nightmares, but we’re not too sure about having to cut our carbon emissions by 10% let alone 50% or 75% that will be required to seriously put the brakes on the feedback loop we’re sliding into.  That will basically put an end to the world economy as we know it.  Recycling grocery bags, drinking tap water, and driving a Prius are not going to cut it. Not to mention the fact that the Chinese and Indians think it’s our problem, while we think it’s everyone’s problem.  Plus there’s the whole question of whether it actually is a problem. I mean it’s only a bunch of egg-heads telling us this stuff. What do they really know? The sun’s still shining. And not that many people are dying. So who gives a whoot?

It’s a good point. We talk a good game, and use everything green to sell more stuff, and our polticians come up with some pretty smart plans to combat global warming, but the truth is simpler. Until billions are dying of thirst, billions more are fleeing their low-lying countries in panic, malaria makes a comeback in what’s left of Manhattan and tsunamis, water wars, floods, hurricanes and other plagues brought upon us by this or that “told you so” deity are everyday occurences, will something – and maybe not that much, be done.

It may sound cynical, but the human race will only come together and combat global warming, when it’s quite literally knee-deep in it.

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own a prius? cough it up, chump.

In the midst of US preparation for the upcoming Copenhagen Treaty on climate change you’d think that we were all laser-focused on trying to combat global warming for once and for all. Uhh, no.

Despite the fact that the lower fossil fuel demand is a boon for reducing emissions it seems that at lower levels of government, reducing our carbon footprint is thrown out with the bathwater when it comes to paying our lowly state and city bills.

I live in Los Angeles. As I drove to drop off my son at school, I heard two news stories. First, the national story – a stirring presentation at the Senate by Al Gore urging Senate support for the Copenhagen treaty. The second was a local story about how money was so tight that the City of LA would no longer offer free meter parking downtown for Hybrids. The amount of money they’ll save will be negligible, but the message is clear. The City of LA doesn’t care if you buy hybrids anymore.

Now, I’m not a big fan of Hybrids for various reasons which I won’t bore you with here, but in a small way they are still at least a symbolic net benefit to the environment – a statement that industry and citizens are at least trying to do “something”. LA’s decision, for so little gain, says essentially that short-term gain trumps long term environmental concerns.

It won’t be the first time in American history that utterly myopic short-termism has dictated policymaking and sadly it won’t be the last, but there’s one thing governments at every level know; global warming doesn’t stop just because the economy does.

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getting kinda hot in here

Houston, and everywhere else in the nation, we have a problem.

In the latest “Direction of Country” Gallup tracking poll, 87% of respondents said we were on the wrong track.

In another recent Gallup poll about the level of environmental concern, 61% said we should be doing more on global warming, and 68% continue to think we should act even if other countries, like China, do less.

Driving less would be one way to improve matters. And yet the recent news from the US Department of Transportation estimates that Americans will drive nearly 80 billion fewer miles in 2008 than we did in 2007 is greeted as a sign the country is on the wrong track, not the right track.

We all know the reason. When the economy is bad, suddenly the environment goes down the list of priorities. Unfortunately, the risk of allowing global warming to increase, (not a dice roll we should be throwing) should trump short-term economic pain. But it doesn’t. We say we really want to stem climate change, even if the bad old Chinese are still pumping out smoke, but when it’s actually happening – we want our cars back.

The cold facts are that if we really want to stop global warming, we have to live more frugally, kind of like we are now in this nasty recession. In short, recessions are green. And if we want to go green for real, we have to get used to living on less, driving less, and buying less. A permanent recession.

When your country produces 25% of the greenhouse gases with 5% of the world’s population, even with all the new green industrial policy that President-elect Obama is going to enact, we’ll still need to make profound sacrifices if we want to reduce the risk of serious climate catastrophe.

Hands up everyone who wants to voluntarily live in a permanent recession to make the world a better place long after we’re dead and gone?

You, sir, at the back, thank you for your support!

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