I blog about environmental and social justice issues because I am very concerned about the health of the interdependent web of life of which we are a part.

Melting Arctic ice.......beautiful and frightening!

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Monday, November 16, 2009

We're Fucked

I am deeply and viciously depressed today so I am going to spread it around. 
Item  one: a headline from the New York Times on Nov. 15, 2009  “ Leaders Will Delay Agreement On Climate. ”  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/world/asia/15prexy.html
At a hastily arranged breakfast on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit meeting on Sunday morning, the leaders, including Lars Lokke Rasmussen, the prime minister of Denmark and the chairman of the climate conference, agreed that in order to salvage Copenhagen they would have to push a fully binding legal agreement down the road, possibly to a second summit meeting in Mexico City later on.
Item two: a post by George Monbiot at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/16/oil-running-out-madman-sandwich-board
As a report commissioned by the US Department of Energy shows, an emergency programme to replace current energy supplies or equipment to anticipate peak oil would need about 20 years to take effect. It seems unlikely that we have it. The world economy is probably knackered, whatever we might do now. But at least we could save farming. There are two possible options: either the mass replacement of farm machinery or the development of new farming systems that don't need much labour or energy.
There you  have it: The Easter Island Syndrome.  Humanity is delaying doing anything meaningful about climate change or peak oil  and all the while disaster grins ominously at us....

And don't bother complaining about my language - your children have much bigger things to worry about than swear words learned on a blog. 

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