Tag Archives: convention

The world’s first official climate refugees land in New Zealand

by USAUnitedCashLoans123 Posted on August 8, 2014

Back in the Hobbit

The world’s first official climate refugees land in New Zealand

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Dmitri Ogleznev / Shutterstock

Among other cataclysmic upheavals, climate change is expected to produce waves of refugees seeking asylum from their flooded, baked, or otherwise uninhabitable countries of origin. It’s already happening, but for the first time New Zealand officials have accepted a refugee application by a family from Tuvalu that cites global warming as the reason they can’t return to their sinking Pacific island nation. They chose Middle Earth over Portlandia because duh, but New Zealand has rejected similar claims in the past.

This decision could have some legal significance — first for New Zealand, and then possibly beyond. From UPI:

As of now, climate change and sea level rise are not officially recognized as legitimate causes of displacement by the International Refugee Convention. And while the case of this Tuvalu family’s application featured other circumstances — the family had lived in New Zealand since 2007 and had strong ties to the community — environmental lawyers have watched the situation closely, curious as to the case’s larger implications.

“I do see the decision as being quite significant,” Environmental law expert Vernon Rive told the New Zealand Herald. “But it doesn’t provide an open ticket for people from all the places that are impacted by climate change. It’s still a very stringent test and it requires exceptional circumstances of a humanitarian nature.”

The Washington Post notes that New Zealand accepted the family for a complex suite of reasons (including strong community ties and elderly relatives), but the fact that the review tribunal acknowledged climate change at all in their ruling is precedent-setting. That doesn’t mean the international community will all jump onboard: Unlike many countries, New Zealand accepts refugees on “exceptional humanitarian grounds,” which in this case included Tuvalu’s about-to-be-underwater status. Until the rest of the world catches up, here’s hoping there are enough hobbit holes to go around.


Source
New Zealand accepts global warming refugees, sort of, UPI

Ted Alvarez is Grist’s managing editor. Follow him @tedster.

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3 New Summer Songs Picked By Critic Jon Young

by Zeniarwpzz Posted on August 4, 2014

Mother Jones

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1. “Is What It Is”

From She Keeps Bees’ Eight Houses

FUTURE GODS

Liner notes: Smokey and languid, Jessica Larrabee croons defiantly, “Be not completely consumed/Do not surrender,” on this hazy ballad, with kindred spirit Sharon Van Etten singing backup.

Behind the music: Larrabee fronted the Philadelphia band the English System before teaming with drummer Andy LaPlant to form the Brooklyn-based duo.

Check it out if you like: Moody chanteuses (Cat Power, Angel Olsen, PJ Harvey).

2. “Pressure”

From My Brightest Diamond’s This Is My Hand

ASTHMATIC KITTY

Liner notes: The fourth MBD album gets off to a rousing start with this joyful brew of marching-band rhythms, xylophone, brass, and Shara Worden’s big, operatic voice.

Behind the music: An alumna of Sufjan Stevens’ band, Worden’s résumé includes collaborations with David Byrne, Matthew Barney, the Blind Boys of Alabama, and the Decemberists.

Check it out if you like: Brainy art-poppers, meaning St. Vincent, tUnE-yArDs, or Joanna Newsom.

3. “To Turn You On”

From Robyn Hitchcock’s The Man Upstairs

YEP ROC

Yep Roc

Liner notes: Hitchcock gives Bryan Ferry’s morose love song a charming, irony-free makeover, setting his surprisingly tender vocal to a delicate chamber-folk arrangement.

Behind the music: The former Soft Boys leader teamed with producer Joe Boyd (Fairport Convention, Anna and Kate McGarrigle) for this vibrant mix of originals and covers (Doors, Psychedelic Furs).

Check it out if you like: Vital vets like Richard Thompson and Marshall Crenshaw.

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3 New Summer Songs Picked By Critic Jon Young

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How We’ve Created a Booming Market for Border Security Technology

by MaudeMiramontes Posted on April 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.

With the agility of a seasoned Border Patrol veteran, the woman rushed after the students. She caught up with them just before they entered the exhibition hall of the eighth annual Border Security Expo, reaching out and grabbing the nearest of them by the shoulder. Slightly out of breath, she said, “You can’t go in there, give me back your badges.”

The astonished students had barely caught a glimpse of the dazzling pavilion of science-fiction-style products in that exhibition hall at the Phoenix Convention Center. There, just beyond their view, more than 100 companies, including Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Verizon, were trying to sell the latest in futuristic border policing technology to anyone with the money to buy it.

The students from Northeastern Illinois University didn’t happen to fall into that category. An earnest manager at a nearby registration table insisted that, as they were not studying “border security,” they weren’t to be admitted. I asked him how he knew just what they were studying. His only answer was to assure me that next year no students would be allowed in at all.

Among the wonders those students would miss was a fake barrel cactus with a hollow interior (for the southern border) and similarly hollow tree stumps (for the northern border), all capable of being outfitted with surveillance cameras. “Anything that grows or exists in nature,” Kurt Lugwisen of TimberSpy told a local Phoenix television station, “we build it.”

Nor would those students get to see the miniature drone—”eyes in the sky” for Border Patrol agents—that fits conveniently into a backpack and can be deployed at will; nor would they be able to check out the “technology that might,” as one local Phoenix reporter warned, “freak you out.” She was talking about facial recognition systems, which in a border scenario would work this way: a person enters a border-crossing gate, where an image of his or her face is instantly checked against a massive facial image database (or the biometric data contained on a passport).”If we need to target on any specific gender or race because we’re trying to find a subject, we can set the parameters and the threshold to find that person,” Kevin Haskins of Cognitec (“the face recognition company”) proudly claimed.

Nor would they be able to observe the strange, two day-long convention hall dance between homeland security, its pockets bursting with their parents’ tax dollars, and private industry intent on creating the most massive apparatus of exclusion and surveillance that has ever existed along US borders.

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How We’ve Created a Booming Market for Border Security Technology

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North Carolina Protected Duke Energy from Pollution Complaints Before the Company’s Coal Ash Disaster

by Aale Thomas Posted on February 10, 2014

Mother Jones

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Last year, North Carolina’s top environmental regulators thwarted three separate Clean Water Act lawsuits aimed at forcing Duke Energy, the largest electricity company in the country, to clean up its toxic coal ash pits in the state. That June, the state went even further, saying it would handle environmental enforcement at every one of Duke’s 31 coal ash storage ponds in the state—an act that protected the company from further federal lawsuits. Last week, one of those coal ash storage ponds ruptured, belching more than 80,000 tons of coal ash into the Dan River.

Now environmental groups and former regulators are charging that North Carolina Republican Gov. Pat McCrory, who worked for Duke for 30 years, has created an atmosphere where the penalties for polluting the environment are low.

The Associated Press reports that McCrory’s Department of Environment and Natural Resources blocked three federal Clean Water Act suits in 2013 by stepping in with its own enforcement authority “at the last minute.” This protected Duke from the kinds of stiff fines and penalties that can result from federal lawsuits. Instead, state regulators arranged settlements that carried miniscule financial penalties and did not require Duke to change how it stores the toxic byproducts of its coal-fired power plants. After blocking the first three suits, which were brought by the Southern Environmental Law Center, the state filed notices saying that it would handle environmental enforcement at every one of Duke’s remaining North Carolina coal ash storage sites—protecting the company from Clean Water Act lawsuits linked to its coal waste once and for all.

The Dan River disaster became public on February 3—one day after Duke officials had been alerted that a pipe beneath a coal ash storage pit of nearly 30 acres had ruptured. “The company reports that up to 82,000 tons of coal ash mixed with 27 million gallons of contaminated water drained out, turning the river gray and cloudy for miles,” the AP reports. “The accident ranks as the third largest such coal ash spill in the nation’s history.”

The AP story suggests that McCrory’s settlements with Duke are part of a pattern of regulatory slackness. A former North Carolina regulator who recently left to work for an environmental advocacy group after nine years working for the state told the AP that under McCrory, who took office in early 2013, she was often instructed not to fine or cite polluters, but instead to help them reach compliance standards. The article continues:

Since his unsuccessful first campaign for governor in 2008, campaign finance reports show Duke Energy, its political action committee, executives and their immediate families have donated at least $1.1 million to McCrory’s campaign and affiliated groups that spent on TV ads, mailings and events to support him.

After winning in 2012, McCrory has appointed former Duke employees like himself to key posts, including state Commerce Secretary Sharon Decker.

His appointee to oversee the state environmental department, Raleigh businessman John Skvarla, describes his agency’s role as being a “partner” to those it regulates, whom he refers to as “customers.”

“That is why we have been able to turn DENR from North Carolina’s No. 1 obstacle of resistance into a customer-friendly juggernaut in such a short time,” Skvarla wrote in a letter to the editor of the News & Observer of Raleigh, published in December. “People in the private sector pour their hearts and souls into their work; instead of crushing their dreams, they now have a state government that treats them as partners.”

McCrory hit back, telling the AP that his administration is “the first in North Carolina history to take legal action against the utility regarding coal ash ponds.” Duke Energy has also made large donations to Democrats, giving $10 million for the Democratic National Convention in 2012.

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North Carolina Protected Duke Energy from Pollution Complaints Before the Company’s Coal Ash Disaster

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Australia’s climate-denying prime minister is convinced he’s the authority on climate change

by VedaGLWCow Posted on October 28, 2013

Australia’s climate-denying prime minister is convinced he’s the authority on climate change

By

Foreign and Commonwealth Office

Global warming is bringing droughts, heat waves, floods, and fires to Australia. The good news for the land down under, however, is that its new prime minister, Tony Abbott, is the self-declared expert on all things climate related. And he says everything is just fine.

The Australian state of New South Wales has been enduring some of its worst bushfires in recent history, fueled by unseasonably hot and dry spring conditions. Asked by CNN about the fires and global warming, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, explained that there is “absolutely” a link between climate change and wildfires in general: “the science is telling us that there are increasing heat waves in Asia, Europe, and Australia; that these will continue; that they will continue in their intensity and in their frequency.”

Abbott dismissed those comments by saying that Figueres was “talking out of her hat.” (Which might well be true, if her hat was fashioned from her résumé cataloging her many years of international climate policy work.)

When that failed to shut up the journalists who kept connecting the dots between bushfires and climate change, Abbott piled on the rhetoric, describing their coverage as “complete hogwash.”

Andrea Schaffer

Don’t worry about those little bushfires, like this one that spewed smoke over Sydney on Oct. 17.

Meanwhile, Abbott is urging Australia’s senate to pass legislation that would dump the former government’s carbon tax, saying he will replace the tax with something he has called “direct action,” in which the government would pay companies to reduce their carbon footprints. Fairfax Media asked 35 prominent university and business economists whether they thought a price on carbon or “direct action” would be more effective in reducing carbon emissions:

Thirty — or 86 per cent — favoured the existing carbon price scheme. Three rejected both schemes.

Internationally renowned Australian economist Justin Wolfers, of the Washington-based Brookings Institution and the University of Michigan, said he was surprised that any economists would opt for direct action, under which the government will pay for emissions cuts by businesses and farmers from a budget worth $2.88 billion over four years.

Professor Wolfers said direct action would involve more economic disruption but have a lesser environmental pay-off than an emissions trading scheme, under which big emitters must pay for their pollution.

BT Financial’s Dr Chris Caton said any economist who did not opt for emissions trading “should hand his degree back”.

In the face of this blowback, do you suppose Abbott is easing up on his misplaced self-assuredness? Surely not. Instead, he’s sticking to his favored trash-talking approach to politics. He told The Washington Post that the recently ousted Labor Party government — which introduced the carbon tax and other climate change–fighting initiatives that he’s now working to destroy — was “wacko,” “incompetent,” and “embarrassing.”


Source
Tony Abbott says UN climate head is ‘talking through her hat’ about fires, The Guardian
‘Complete hogwash’? When Bolt grilled Abbott, it sure was, Crikey
Tony Abbott’s new direct action sceptics, Canberra Times

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Australia’s climate-denying prime minister is convinced he’s the authority on climate change

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Anthony Foxx, transit booster, confirmed as transportation secretary

by Dean Golan Posted on June 27, 2013

Anthony Foxx, transit booster, confirmed as transportation secretary

By Claire Thompson

U.S. Department of Labor

Anthony Foxx.

Anthony Foxx, the transit-friendly mayor of Charlotte, N.C., has been confirmed as Obama’s transportation secretary in a rare unanimous Senate vote. (GOP lawmakers must be focusing all their energy on obstructing Gina McCarthy’s nomination for EPA chief.) He’ll be the youngest member of Obama’s cabinet.

From the Associated Press:

Foxx, 42, is considered a charismatic rising figure in the Democratic party and was a staunch and active campaigner for President Barack Obama in North Carolina, including playing host to the Democratic National Convention. …

Foxx is expected to continue in the vein of [former Transportation Secretary Ray] LaHood. He told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee that safety would be his top priority at a nomination hearing a month ago.

His short tenure as mayor, and his professional background, suggest he will also carry on LaHood’s fondness for rail and transit.

Foxx worked to expand Charlotte’s light-rail system, break ground on an electric streetcar project in the city, and build electric vehicle-charging infrastructure. During his three and a half years as mayor, Charlotte’s unemployment rate dropped more than 3 percent, in part thanks to Foxx’s efforts to bolster the city’s reputation as an energy-industry hub.

Some transportation-policy wonks worry that LaHood will be a tough act to follow considering Foxx’s relative inexperience. But Foxx is no stranger to Washington, D.C. — he’s worked for the Department of Justice and the House Judiciary Committee, and he collaborated closely with the Obama team when Charlotte hosted the Democratic National Convention last year.

But just because his confirmation process was smooth sailing doesn’t mean Foxx won’t have his work cut out for him in the Transportation Department. The Charlotte Observer reports:

The department faces an immediate problem in finding a sustainable funding stream for badly needed improvements to roads, bridges and transit systems. It also has struggled to replace the country’s radar-based air-traffic-control system, which dates to the 1950s, with a modern, satellite-based system.

The Highway Trust Fund, which was created in the 1950s to fund the construction and maintenance of the Interstate Highway System, is going broke. Since the 1980s, the fund has also supported transit systems – a signature issue for Foxx.

Federal gasoline tax revenue has become insufficient to support the fund, and Congress has bailed it out with more than $50 billion from the U.S. Treasury in the past five years.

The 18.4-cents-a-gallon tax has remained unchanged in two decades, and Foxx will have to consider whether to raise it or replace it with something else. Almost any choice would force drivers to pay more, and would be politically unpopular.

All we want to know is, will he bike to work?

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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Thanks for the oil, Iraq, here’s some cancer

by Felixct7yh Posted on March 20, 2013

Thanks for the oil, Iraq, here’s some cancer

By Susie Cagle

Turns out depleted uranium (DU) munitions are a great thing to use when you’re going to war, so long as you plan on terrorizing people for generations to come. Military-related pollution is suspected of causing a huge spike in birth defects and all kinds of cancer in Iraq since the start of the Gulf War more than 20 years ago.

The last 10 years of the Iraq War, especially, cost a lot of money that we could’ve done way better things with and also killed 190,000 people directly, but that doesn’t cover the full extent of the damage.

expertinfantry

An American soldier in front of an oil-field fire near Kirkuk in 2006.

“Official Iraqi government statistics show that, prior to the outbreak of the First Gulf War in 1991, the rate of cancer cases in Iraq was 40 out of 100,000 people,” Al Jazeera reports. “By 1995, it had increased to 800 out of 100,000 people, and, by 2005, it had doubled to at least 1,600 out of 100,000 people. Current estimates show the increasing trend continuing.” That’s potentially a more than 4,000 percent increase in the cancer rate, making it more than 500 percent higher than the cancer rate in the U.S.

More from Al Jazeera:

As shocking as these statistics are, due to a lack of adequate documentation, research, and reporting of cases, the actual rate of cancer and other diseases is likely to be much higher than even these figures suggest.

“Cancer statistics are hard to come by, since only 50 per cent of the healthcare in Iraq is public,” Dr Salah Haddad of the Iraqi Society for Health Administration and Promotion told Al Jazeera. “The other half of our healthcare is provided by the private sector, and that sector is deficient in their reporting of statistics. Hence, all of our statistics in Iraq must be multiplied by two. Any official numbers are likely only half of the real number.”

Dr Haddad believes there is a direct correlation between increasing cancer rates and the amount of bombings carried out by US forces in particular areas.

“My colleagues and I have all noticed an increase in Fallujah of congenital malformations, sterility, and infertility,” he said. “In Fallujah, we have the problem of toxics introduced by American bombardments and the weapons they used, like DU.”

One researcher said Fallujah had been found to have “the highest rate of genetic damage in any population ever studied.” Another is calling for “large scale environmental testing to find out the extent of environmental contamination by metals and DU.”

A 1977 amendment to the Geneva Conventions prohibits weapons and methods of warfare that cause unnecessary suffering. But who cares about the Geneva Convention anyway? Certainly no one with uranium.

And lest we forget why we dropped all that depleted uranium in the first place, oil industry analyst Antonia Juhasz reminds us at CNN:

Oil was not the only goal of the Iraq War, but it was certainly the central one, as top U.S. military and political figures have attested to in the years following the invasion.

“Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan agreed, writing in his memoir, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Then-Sen. and now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the same in 2007: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”

And it only took CNN 10 years to figure it out!

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Famed idiot Lord Monckton banned for life from U.N. climate talks

by Myrna Posted on December 7, 2012

Famed idiot Lord Monckton banned for life from U.N. climate talks

By Philip Bump

Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, better known as Lord Monckton, is a buffoon. He created a film called Apocalypse? No!, the name of which is a funny joke playing on the fact that Monckton doesn’t believe in climate change. Climate apocalypse? No! says this guy whose scientific credentials are listed on a grain of salt that can be found at the bottom of the ocean. Monckton has built his name (or, perhaps more accurately, ruined the name he inherited) with his climate antics, prompting Grist to several times mock him.

And now Monckton brings a new ignominious distinction to a family name that has survived lo these many centuries, as a clown who got kicked out of a United Nations climate conference.

From the Telegraph:

The hereditary peer, who is not a member of the House of Lords, took the chair of Myanmar and spoke into the microphone against U.N. climate change protocols.

After a short speech, in which he was booed, he was escorted out of the meeting by UN guards.

He is understood to have claimed there is no global warming in the last sixteen years, and therefore the science needs to be reviewed.

Claiming to represent Asian coastal nations, he is understood to have said: “In the 16 years we have been coming to these events there has been no global warming at all.”

(If you require a rebuttal of that “16 years” bit, voila.)

The irony of this is that the conference that kicked Monckton out is the annually futile Convention on Climate Change, which today is struggling to fulfill its mandate of finalizing deck-chair-rearranging recommendations for fighting global warming. If anything, the science that undergirds the conference needs to be reviewed because it’s too conservative, as noted by Daily Climate.

Across two decades and thousands of pages of reports, the world’s most authoritative voice on climate science has consistently understated the rate and intensity of climate change and the danger those impacts represent, say a growing number of studies on the topic. …

As the latest round of United Nations climate talks in Doha wrap up this week, climate experts warn that the [U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change]‘s failure to adequately project the threats that rising global carbon emissions represent has serious consequences: The IPCC’s overly conservative reading of the science, they say, means governments and the public could be blindsided by the rapid onset of the flooding, extreme storms, drought, and other impacts associated with catastrophic global warming.

But Monckton won’t be bringing his inadvertently sort-of-correct message to the U.N. again anytime soon. As the Telegraph notes:

He has been banned for life from UN climate talks. …

He has been ‘de-badged’, meaning he no longer has a visa to stay in Qatar and had 24 hours to leave the country.

What Qatar doesn’t realize is that the whole thing is a joke. Monckton isn’t actually an embarrassing British peer with a less-than-firm grasp on the scientific realities of the world. No, he’s something else entirely.

Source

British peer ejected from UN climate talks for denouncing protocol, Telegraph

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Duke Energy CEO will step down because of how he iced the previous guy

by Myrna Posted on November 30, 2012

Duke Energy CEO will step down because of how he iced the previous guy

By Philip Bump

kkoukopoulos

Duke Energy headquarters. (Not pictured: the revolving doors.)

You may remember the tenure of Bill Johnson as CEO of Duke Energy. It was a halcyon time for the corporation, that one day in July before Johnson was ousted by Jim Rogers.

There were some people who thought it was kind of weird that Johnson should serve one day, “resign,” and take home $44 million for his hard work. People like the North Carolina Utilities Commission, which has now demanded that Rogers take a hike, too.

From the Associated Press:

Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers will step down as head of the largest U.S. electric utility by the end of 2013 as part of a settlement with the North Carolina utilities regulator that ends an investigation into the company’s takeover of in-state rival Progress Energy. …

Hours after the merger was completed July 2, Duke Energy’s board ousted Progress Energy CEO Bill Johnson, who was supposed to take over the combined company. It had promised to keep him in place throughout the 18-month process of merging the two Fortune 500 energy companies headquartered in North Carolina. The deal created the nation’s largest electric company. …

While Duke Energy denied wrongdoing, the utilities commission said the settlement includes the company issuing a statement acknowledging it has “fallen short of the commission’s understanding of Duke’s obligations” as a regulated utility.

The important/good/interesting news for the people of North Carolina: Duke will also use $25 million in merger-related savings to lower rates as opposed to paying stockholders.

Where will Rogers go next? Well, he spent his time as head of Duke wisely, building political connections sufficient to land him a speaking role during the Democratic National Convention. (During that speech he didn’t once mention Duke Energy.) And if Johnson’s career path is any guide, Rogers will land on his feet: Johnson is now the head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the largest public utility in the country. (He earns less than $44 million a day, however.)

And if all else fails, Rogers could run for office. After all, there’s a North Carolina House seat that could be easily contested in two years.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Can’t we just skip ahead to the end of this U.N. climate conference already?

by Myrna Posted on November 26, 2012

Can’t we just skip ahead to the end of this U.N. climate conference already?

By Philip Bump

jikatu

Doha, Qatar.

I wonder whether more Americans know what Qatar is or know that the U.N. has an annual convening to discuss climate change. Neither has much of an impact on our lives.

And so it is with trepidation that I bother to relay that the aforementioned U.N. gathering is just getting underway in Doha, Qatar — a whole entirely equivalent to the sum of its parts. Here is an AP article about the meeting; here is one from the International Herald Tribune. The basic theme so far has been hope that the U.S. will actually step into a leadership role following Sandy and the reelection of Obama. If you’re wondering how likely that is, you can see this thing I wrote last week or you can note that the U.S. is already defending how much progress it has made. Which it has, but that’s like saying that when I jump up in the air, I’m making progress toward a moon landing.

There’s a bit of excitement to report. On day one (today), there is already a dispute over whether or not developed countries upheld a commitment to provide $30 billion in assistance to developing countries to aid climate change efforts. From Bloomberg:

The question over how much finance was provided under the “fast-start” program has the potential to undermine trust between donor and recipient nations during two weeks of United Nations talks on a treaty to curb global warming. Aid is the linchpin of the talks starting today in Doha after industrial nations pledged in 2009 to channel $100 billion a year for climate projects by 2020. …

The European Union, U.S., Japan and other developed nations paid out $23.6 billion of assistance to poorer countries during the three years through 2012, falling short of the $30 billion promised in 2009, the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development said today. An estimate today from the World Resources Institute in Washington put the total paid at almost $34 billion.

Here’s how ridiculous this squabble is. Earlier today (as I mentioned), the New York City mayor’s office announced that it expected the economic damage from Sandy to total some $19 billion. Independently calculated damage to the city’s transit system, meanwhile, nears $5 billion. The cost to the state on the whole could top $42 billion. That’s $12 billion more than the entire amount of money being grudgingly supplied (maybe) to countries that will be disproportionately affected by climate change, just to clean up a climate-change-worsened mess in one state.

Similar financial obligations are part of the reason that developed countries (a term one should use with all due sense of irony) are reluctant to participate in the U.N. gathering. As difficult as it is to get those countries (primarily the United States) to deal with their own pollution, it’s that much harder to get them to contribute to less-wealthy countries — despite the obvious correlation between the growth of wealth and decades of greenhouse gas emissions.

So, anyway, for the next two weeks various representatives of various countries will meet in Qatar and discuss how to curb emissions that The Economist today noted are already 11 percent higher than the best-case scenario for 2020. I’ll just fast-forward to the end for you, quoting an article that might as well be written today to save everyone some time.

After two weeks of fraught negotiations, participants in the United Nations’ Convention on Climate Change arrived at a last-minute agreement on a plan to curb carbon dioxide emissions. While not binding and not approaching the level of cuts suggested by the expiring Kyoto Protocol, attendees seemed confident that the agreement provided a strong framework for next year’s negotiations.

“We’re pleased with the agreement discussed,” said some dude representing the United States. Despite the lack of any actual controls on his country’s pollution, “the United States is strongly committed to international action to slow global warming, and we feel confident that this is a great step forward.” The official then jumped in the air and asked to be identified in this article as an astronaut.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Can’t we just skip ahead to the end of this U.N. climate conference already?

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Can’t we just skip ahead to the end of this U.N. climate conference already?