2066 And All That:Dear Copenhagen, there is no Planet B.

"Uh-oh!"

     

I'm cross at the folks who brought you Copenhagen. It's never a good thing to get FunkyPix2 cross. World leaders like Brown, Obama and Rudd risk their necks if I get cross. FunkyPix2 got very cross at Australia's John Ducklips Howard... and just look what happened to him.

     

Iran's Ahmedinejad has a genuine point, unfortunately, when he suggests that the major polluters such as Australia*, Canada, the UK and the USA (what I call the Un-Developing countries) need to seriously reconsider the assumed merits of Capitalism/Democracy. It's obvious enough that "Pro-profit = Anti-Climate": watch Obama lying about the great success of Copenhagen.

*Australia has the highest carbon emissions per head in the entire world... Shame Straya Shame.

     

But it's also obvious that no country which is constrained by a 3- or 4-year election horizon can effectively plan for the Longer Run. China, with its Socialist one-party system, is actually achieving far more than the West in terms of Green reforms, forest-planting, economic safety-nets etc. Admittedly, it's sometimes at a cost to sections of its citizens, but certainly far more benevolent than the military junta in Burma.

    

By contrast, Western Capitalism (formerly known as Colonialism) is designed to maximize profit and to concentrate it in the hands of a hugely wealthy elite - and to hell with the rest. Therefore the Global Common Good is almost inevitably a casualty, as the 2009 financial train-wreck amply demonstrates.

    

The Elephants in the Room, therefore, are the very institutions we're all expected to take for granted as immutable, beyond question, sacrosanct... they are
    

Capitalism & Democracy

    

If we refuse to question them or consider changes, we in the West are as guilty of Fundamentalism as the very people we so often accuse. If we unilaterally deny that our system is imperfect, we are complicit in its failures and must accept the consequences. By saying that, I will of course be smeared as a ranting member of some knot of sandalled left-wing zealots - but no, I'm just another local lad who is bold enough to point out that the emperor is, in fact, at least partly naked.
    
The most dire consequence of all is Rapid Climate Change.

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In the following Short and Pugnaciously Cynical Photo Essay designed to assist World Citizens to cope with the coming Underwater Age (the real Age of Aquarius?), I pose more Questions than Answers:

I begin with the necessary Rapid Darwinian Adaptions which will clearly be necessary for future life underwater: Gill & Fin Surgery may soon bump facelifts as the number one elective procedure:

A Hollywood heart-throb of the future?

...or just a failed Prototype?

So, more realistically speaking, perhaps this
merman tailfin will be recorded by Historians as the
equivalent of the Wright Brothers' biplane flight:

When streets go under water - as parts of Bangkok already have -

you may have to adapt to overhead walkways to get around:

a dead thing...

Welcome to New Paris, in the year 2066...

...and Manhattan

 

...and here's a quicker solution for Climate Change Deniers such as Australia's stand-up comedian Opposition leader Mr Rabbit (member of Gravity Deniers and Flat Earth Society):

FUKITOL ...thoughtfully brought to you by

PS: Even the very name of Mr Rabbit's party - the "Liberal" Party (HO-HO) is a bare-faced lie. It ain't liberal, it's ultra conservative. It's Australia's equivalent of the Republican Right-wing Pro-lifers.

Eeeeew.

   
Do you want a really honest no-holds-barred summary of why Copenhagen was always destined to bellyflop? Click here.
A camel is a horse designed by a committee.
Hold that thought.
   
NEWSFLUSH !! ...and in Breaking Wind, here's an interesting interview with a Copenhagen insider who reveals who was really in control of negotiations. I've copied an extract:

EMMA ALBERICI: There certainly was an impression by the end of it that the West, led by the European Union and the US, was bullying the poor and developing world into submission, into signing up for some kind of binding emission cuts.
   
MARK LYNAS: Yeah well I think that's rubbish. I mean that's certainly not what I saw. If anything it was the West being bullied by the developing countries. Only the big ones, of course, because the smaller countries don't really have much of a voice.
   
EMMA ALBERICI: Who was it from China involved in this obfuscation? Was it the Premier, Wen Jiabao?
   
MARK LYNAS: No it wasn't Wen Jiabao and that's also significant that the Chinese forced Obama to sit opposite a sort of mid-level official in the Foreign Ministry. I don't know what the man's name was but he was obviously a very experience negotiator and he played a very inscrutable poker face approach really.
   
And he had to keep on leaving the room to make phone calls to his superiors as he put it because he was only a civil servant, leaving President Obama and all of the other leaders and Kevin Rudd included sitting there tapping their fingers waiting for him to come back with some news.
   
I think it was meant to cause offence and probably some offence was taken.
   
TONY EASTLEY: Mark Lynas, environmental adviser to the Maldives at the talks in Copenhagen, speaking there with Emma Alberici.