Coping with Copenhagen

As thousands of climate scientists and environmentalists plead with their governments to get serious about our planet’s broken ecology, the pols dithered on. The much heralded and anticipated worldwide conference of world leaders in Copenhagen Denmark on the climate crisis resulted in little tangible -no binding agreements, no solid commitments, mostly just a lot of hot air (to add to our already overheated atmosphere.) Basically it was just three weeks of posturing and bullshit. The discord bred a weak toothless and 'voluntary' (read: easily ignored) sets of accords. The US, unable to guarantee cooperation from a Congress soon to be held hostage by an unholy alliance of Climate Crisis Deniers in the Republican Party and Democrats from coal and oil states, had little leverage against, developing countries who hadn't yet gotten their chance to participate in the global cookout. And then are the millions of hapless poverty stricken wretches in countries and island nations you never heard of who never owned a car or ever lit up a coal fired furnace in the winter, who are slated to get hit first as this thing seriously sets in. In short Copenhagen was a big flop.

Time grinds on as we continue locked in a death dance with our beloved machine of industrial capitalism. It built (for some of us) a comfortable civilization; now it is poised to take it back. We ran our machines and heated or houses for years on the carbonized remains of billions of primitive predecessors. Now we are chocking on our waste like some ancient pack of Neanderthals trapped in their cave amidst their midden of bones, rotting gristle and shit. The carbon dioxide belching monster has become fused with us and become us. It has become our master. We need our machines to exist; our machines need us to feed them the carbon deposits we ripped, tore and pumped from the earth – the oil, the coal, the gas. And if that were not bad enough, along with servicing our soulless machines, we still, after evolving as omnivores and able to survive on plant protein, desire to eat the flesh of hapless domesticated ungulates - endless herds of them – millions and millions of them live short, miserable, unnatural existences in foul stinking feedlots to provide us with our daily animal protein fixes. All the while they are pumping massive invisible clouds of methane gas farts into our atmosphere to merge with the existing coal and oil wastes creating a deadly stew of planet suffocating gases.

Our political “leaders”, charlatans mostly, only rise as far as they can manipulate the levers of power of their respective nationalistic political machines. Most politicians are simply smooth talking, self serving, ambitious egotists. The few that really want to seriously engage the problems are shunted aside by the real power brokers, the ones representing the carbon hungry giants – the superpower formations, the US, Japan, Europe and now China. Each is maneuvering for advantage. Economic and imperialistic dominance trumps real recognition of the gravity of the problem. And our time continues to run out. No one can stop it; no one can slow it down. How can a species that cannot even evolve to the point that can stop engaging armed national gangs (known as armies) to regularly slaughter each other, how can such a species hope to cooperate in such monumental collective undertaking as changing the totality of the way we live? For instance here in the US even, as we grapple ideologically with the Herculean task of changing our entire mode of production, we are involved in two major wars without end – one of them in fact over a carbon based energy source. So at our present primeval level of human evolution, to agree to reverse direction of our beloved carbon fueled industrial machine, to slam the motherfucker into reverse is way too much to expect.

And to top it off, drawing energy from the whole effort, the USA, the preeminent voracious gobbler of carbon based fuels is bogged down in trying to fix their long broken health care system. The will of the average Americans is crippled by a self indulgent consumerist culture. Americans are now feeling disabled and despondent as their collective credit card maxes out and their living wage jobs stay gone. Americans it seems can't be bothered with a mere planetary crisis. If fact many conveniently believe it's all simply a liberal myth. The number who give top billing to the climate crisis is has now fallen below 50%. And the erstwhile hope of all thinking people, our new leader in this post-Bushian “reform era”, the professorial, rhetorically gifted Barack Obama with his political party in control of Congress ,alas, is turning out to be a profound disappointment. His administration's centerpiece health care reform package daily shrinks in promise becoming only a ghost of what the could have been. It is now a soggy smelly embarrassment that Congressional Democrats will have to pass out clothespins for their noses prior to the final vote. So at that sad juncture a distracted Obama trooped off to the global climate crisis conference on its final day to preside over its whimpering pathetic finale.