Weathering Climate Change

Let’s be up-front and frank about the whole climate change issue.

Setting targets for a carbon trading scheme, uttering platitudes to placate green groups, issuing freebies for heavy polluters….it’s all spin, politically driven to deliver a tool to incumbent governments around the world with which to clobber political opponents. The announcement yesterday by Australia’s Labor government is proof positive of the politicisation of the issue, if ever such proof was needed. Five percent cut in carbon output by 2020, maybe…..and it’s a huge maybe….. up to a gloriously dangerous fifteen percent if the world collective decides to sign off on equally insignificant targets. The world won’t, of course, because every single industrialised nation fears the backlash from voters against incumbent governments which force the end consumer to cop the fiscal load.
Don’t kid yourself that any difference in political flavour here in Oz, or anywhere else on the planet, would make the slightest bit of difference. The costs of addressing the damage humanity has already wreaked on it’s one and only homeworld are already beyond what it can cope with. Politicians crave power more than anything else because power feeds the ego. It’s amusing to me that ego is what brings us to where we are today. One might say, rampant capitalism has as big a hand in the destruction of the planetary climate, biological diversity and long-term tenure of humanity as it has had on global financial stability, as proven in recent months. We’re greedy, selfish, thoughtless and above all else, human. We are what we are and we’re unlikely to change even to the point of staring extinction in the face. Hyperbole? I don’t believe so, because nothing is going to change in the climate change arena.
I remain an optimist, however, that someday probably eons distant from today, a dedicated breed of homo sapiens sapiens will arise, concerned more about survival and preservation of its own existence as a species, than preservation of a small portion of the global society’s lifestyle.