Issue 148 – November 2009

When a house is burning down, the important thing is to put out the fire. Although the neighbours might be able to help, the fire brigade is expected to manage operations. We expect the State to provide the necessary support to put out the fire. Once it is out, experts will establish the causes of the fire and, in the event of arson, the perpetrators will be held responsible and duly punished in accordance with the law. But first the fire needs to be put out.

It seems increasingly likely that no binding deal will come out of Copenhagen and that the North will attempt to scrap the Kyoto Protocol. It also seems likely that some sort of deal will be pushed through on reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD). There is a serious danger that REDD will act as greenwash for the North's failure to reduce emissions dramatically.

According to Wikipedia, “a circus is commonly a travelling company of performers that may include acrobats, clowns, animals, trapeze acts, hoopers, tightrope walkers, jugglers, unicyclists and other stunt-oriented artists.” Unfortunately, it has a strong similarity with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change where acrobats, jugglers, magicians and trapeze acrobats have been trying to entertain the world audience making people believe that they are seriously discussing ways of addressing the current climate crisis.

A team of biologists and climate modellers at NASA have come up with a very “practical” alternative to phasing out fossil fuels. Their plan is to plant massive blocks of fast growing trees –for example eucalyptus- in the deserts of the Sahara and Australian outback. Lack of water? No problem! The trees would be watered by seawater treated by a string of coastal desalination plants and channelled through a vast irrigation network. Easy.

Some jugglers of the climate circus are tossing up charcoal to catch it again but now with a fancy name. The proposal of turning residues into fine-grained charcoal and ploughing billions of tonnes of it into the soil every year convert charcoal into “biochar”. The charcoal is produced through a process called pyrolysis, whereby biomass is exposed to high temperatures in the absence of oxygen. This produces two types of fuels in addition to the charcoal (syngas and bio-oil), which can be used for heat and power, or further refined into agrofuels for cars or, potentially, for aviation.

Now come the acrobats. The Copenhagen Consensus Centre think-tank is working hard to weigh really true solutions to altering the alterated climate. Let’s see.

There is nothing like creating a problem for finding a good business opportunity . Or at least this is so for seasoned business men and women. It is thus that behind wars one can easily find the arms business. Behind citizen insecurity -largely resulting from social and economic inequity- is the business of security: insurance monitoring systems, bars, alarms and heavy-handed “saviour” politicians.  Behind disease is the “health” business: the drug industry and corporate medical power.

There is no doubt that public opinion has become aware of the climate change issue. However, for most people this is but a headline in the newspapers and they tend to think that although this is in fact a major problem, there is no need to worry about it because the UN is working to solve it and that surely science will invent something to prevent it from happening. 

Even when everything would seem to indicate that the future of the planet’s climate is in the hands of a group of clowns, the possibility always exists of recovering common sense, that is to say, the sense of ordinary people.  And it is precisely from there, from the grass roots, the social organizations, NGOs and from sensible people that the drive and the force will stem to propose, denounce and scatter the word that will shake world society and make it demand that those responsible for public policies act in accordance with the seriousness of climate change. 

International negotiations about global climate protection have been slow, delivering meagre results. The debate began over 20 years ago, articulating the target of achieving 20 per cent in CO2 emissions reductions, and ended up in the Kyoto Protocol with a mere 5 per cent – and even this has been questioned time and again.