LBmuskoka
One Big Step for Government
Posted on: 12/12/2010 12:13
One small step in the right direction for the planet....
Global accord on climate change hailed as breakthrough
Shawn McCarthy, — Global Energy Reporter
Cancun, Mexico— Globe and Mail Update
Published Saturday, Dec. 11, 2010 7:03AM EST
Excerpt
The Cancun agreement endorses the view that climate change is “one of the greatest challenges of our time” and requires long-term and co-operative action in order to prevent devastating impacts across the planet, including droughts, floods and rising sea levels. All countries have committed to boost their effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and to have their plans reviewed by the international community.
Chief U.S. negotiator Todd Stern said the deal “while not perfect, is certainly a good basis for moving forward,” adding it would “put the world on a more hopeful path toward a low-emissions and sustainable future.”
Environmental groups hailed the package as a significant step towards a new international treaty that will including binding commitments from the United States, China and other major emitters of greenhouse gases.
“We are much further than we thought we would be before coming to Cancun,” said Wendy Trio, climate policy director for Greenpeace.
And another view from the NYTimes
Climate Talks End With Modest Deal on Emissions
By JOHN M. BRODER
Published: December 11, 2010
Excerpt
CANCÚN, Mexico — The United Nations climate change conference began with modest aims and ended early Saturday with modest achievements. But while the measures adopted here may have scant near-term impact on the warming of the planet, the international process for dealing with the issue got a significant vote of confidence.
The agreement fell well short of the broad changes scientists say are needed to avoid dangerous climate change in coming decades. But it lays the groundwork for stronger measures in the future, if nations are able to overcome the emotional arguments that have crippled climate change negotiations in recent years.
[...]
In all, the success of the Cancún talks was a shot in the arm for a process that some had likened to a zombie, stumbling aimlessly but refusing to die.
“None of this, of course, is world changing,” said Michael A. Levi, who follows climate issues at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. “The Cancún agreement should be applauded not because it solves everything, but because it chooses not to: it focuses on those areas where the U.N. process has the most potential to be useful, and avoids other areas where the U.N. process is a dead end. The outcome does not change the fact that most of the important work of cutting emissions will be driven outside the U.N. process.”
Here's looking to the day all our baby governments grow up and walk with greater strides!
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MikePaterson
Posted on: 12/12/2010 12:22
Amen!!
RussP
Posted on: 12/12/2010 17:44
Kiss you grandchildren's tookus, or is that tookeye, goodby.
IT
Russ
Judd
Posted on: 12/12/2010 18:38
I'm glad I live in central Canada, because in 50 years, much of the inhabited world will be either desert or under water.
graeme
Posted on: 12/13/2010 12:12
Well, yes. But Toronto is scarcely an attractive alternative.
Jim Kenney
Posted on: 12/13/2010 15:50
The Revolution is still coming! Keep hoping for something good.
LBmuskoka
Posted on: 12/13/2010 19:09
Here's another article to give a little hope that even what appears to be limited action can evenutally lead to bigger things. This is the story of one woman, Julia Platt, the 1930's mayor of Pacific Grove, California and her legacy...
How Monterey Bay Was Saved from the Brink
Alternet: December 11, 2010 Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from The Death and Life of Monterey Bay by Stephen R. Palumbi and Carolyn Sotka
[...]
Why is this place so beautiful, so full of wildlife and suffused with the clean tang of the sea? Most of the visitors to Julia's town of Pacific Grove, or to Monterey next door, assume it has always been this way. Little do they know how recently the bay suffered an industrial blight that wrecked the ecology and the economy. Few of them realize how recently the wonderful tourist shores of Lovers Point stood polluted and abandoned--how bad they looked in 1935, the year of Julia's death.
Had it existed when westerners came permanently to Monterey in 1769, Julia's window would have chronicled a steady ruin of Monterey Bay since that time. It would have seen the merchants and hunters turning one wild species after another into a market commodity that was plucked off the shore for profit. French explorer Jean-François de la Pérouse was paying a courtesy call at the Spanish capital Monterey in 1786, when he remarked on the wonderful creatures he saw there: sea otters. He knew the Russians were making a fortune selling otter pelts to the rich Chinese aristocracy. Odd, he thought, that the Spanish do not do the same. And soon they did.
A whale was worth a pound or two of pure gold in 1854, and J. P. Davenport used exploding lances to deliver them to shore-based vats of boiling oil. In the late 1800s, abalone brought a whole Chinese village to the Pacific Grove shore, complete with lacy incense, smugglers, and the customs of the Celestial Empire. Fourteen million seabird eggs, gathered on coastal islands, went down the gullets of the Gold Rush prospectors, fueling their hunt for treasure but destroying seabird populations. From the 1910s to 1940s, a new canning industry was driven to unheard-of size on the strength of the sardines of Monterey. Every one of these enterprises collapsed in the ashes of its own greed; first the otters, then the whales, birds, abalone, and sardines were exploited until they were largely gone.
[...]
Julia's window looked out over this frenzy like a grouchy neighbor eyeing a wild party. And in her last years, the Monterey Bay called for help. Julia couldn't keep herself from striving against the continual onslaught and destruction. She predicted the doom that the canneries would bring and tried to slow their growth. But she was pushed aside by the economic might of the biggest fishery anyone had ever seen. Thwarted in her campaign to save all of Monterey Bay, she conceived a stealthy legacy that would wait quietly until it was needed and until the world was ready for it. She created for her town and her bay two small protected areas, marine gardens for the future. They eventually paid off in a legacy of ecological rebirth, but only after the bay passed through the worst decades of its environmental life.
Monteray State Beach, 2009
Faerenach
Posted on: 12/15/2010 12:22
So, the UCC Moderator Marti Tindal wrote a rather scathing review of Harper's Climate Change leadership, and I couldn't help but read the comments.
Seriously?? Do this many people believe that Climate Change is a fraud? Do they honestly believe that we as humans have absolutely no irreparable impact on this earth?
Jim Kenney
Posted on: 12/15/2010 16:52
Denial is a normal grieving response. What has been is dieing, and the new is yet to be born. Many people want to deny what has happened and is happening for a variety of reasons. Some pro-fossil fuel professors at the University of Calgary (in the social sciences mostly) used a pretty shady process to funnel money from anonymous sources through the Calgary Foundation and the University of Calgary Foundations program to fund Friends of Science to provide misinformation under the guise of information. Even though most forward-thinking people see an eventual end to fossily fuels as fuels (they will be too valuable as a resource for manufacturing to continue to burn them), a lot of people have trouble seeing beyond this month's pay cheque.
Jim Kenney
Posted on: 12/15/2010 16:52
Denial is a normal grieving response. What has been is dieing, and the new is yet to be born. Many people want to deny what has happened and is happening for a variety of reasons. Some pro-fossil fuel professors at the University of Calgary (in the social sciences mostly) used a pretty shady process to funnel money from anonymous sources through the Calgary Foundation and the University of Calgary Foundations program to fund Friends of Science to provide misinformation under the guise of information. Even though most forward-thinking people see an eventual end to fossily fuels as fuels (they will be too valuable as a resource for manufacturing to continue to burn them), a lot of people have trouble seeing beyond this month's pay cheque.
Faerenach
Posted on: 12/16/2010 09:16
Jim Kenney - I know it was probably a typo, but I really love the term 'fossily fuels'.