Americans still refuse to act on Climate.

international | environment | other press Tuesday November 29, 2005 12:59 by iosaf mac diarmada barcelona (as usual)

"I accuse you of provoking the mighty wind & drawing the hoary frost"

This week sees yet another international government conference on "Climate change". The event being held in Montreal Quebec is seeing over 160 countries attempt yet again to cobble together a solution on "reduction of emissions" to "fix our weather".

We all know its broken. Huricane Delta has just hit the Canary islands, with 7 islander deaths confirmed and unknown numbers of dead migrants in the seas between the archipelago and Africa. a quarter of a million people left without power.

(they don't normally get tropical storms in the eastern Atlantic, they used to be a phenomona pretty much completely restricted to the "start" of the Gulf Stream in the Carribean sea area. Though there have been exceptions. Hurricanes have hit Europe before, many years ago a "freak" storm hit both Ireland and the UK. But this year alone several such storms have started in the eastern Atlantic between the Canary and Azore island systems. "Delta" is the first to make "European landfall" the last blew herself out near the Azores).

So what does the USA have to say now?

Apparantly not much.

This was the year when we quite dramatically saw the inablity of the superpower to cope with natural disaster in the botched evacuation of New Orleans for "Katrina", and arguably in the latter needless evacuation of Houston for "Rita". - We know now that neither FEMA nor the US authorities will ever effect such a large "voluntary evacuation" again.

Meanwhile other storms came and brought wholesale destruction, poverty, homelessness, destruction of crops, infrastructure &c.., to middle America. Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Cuba were all hard hit this year.

And extreme weather hit Europe too. The summer saw flooding and death in cental European states, the exact same time that Katrina hit the USA, both Romania and Bulgaria were flooded for the fourth time in 2005.

In the last weeks we see "unusual" snowfall and harsh winters. Crops which were parched by Sunshine and lack of rain all summer in Europe and Africa are now further challenged by Early frosts. Any food that remains in the fields is further troubled by the virulence of fungal and yeast infections.

These are the conditions that brought about blight.

Blight in turn killed Europe. An Gort Mhor in Ireland was followed by fungal "attack" on the crops of mid-19th century Europe and mass emigration brought millions of our forebears to the land of the car, the USA.

The chinwagging will be of course be held in secure buildings, with air conditioning. I still remember the ridiculous Japanese minister who in the last moments before the G8 meeting in Gleneagles scotland told of his premier's practicality.

"Our PM is very practical. He says loosen your tie, instead of turning up the air-conditioning in the hotter summers. This is an example of new thinking. In Tokyo now in summer months we don't need to wear ties in the office". (paraphrase as i remember the interview with BBC world july 6th 2005)

- I must admit i almost choked on my meusli.

So will the USA finally agree to Kyoto reductions on green house gasses?

Will they admit the most important war, that on "mother nature" is not theirs to win, and they must sacrifice their cars, fridges, cheap flights, their whole post Blight prosperity?

Or are to wait as Bush said in his pre-G8 climate remarks 2005, for the day when "we'll all have different car engines soon enough"?

It appears they are "defending" their decision to avoid Kyoto. It seems they want to push their cars on the freeway to destruction after all.

http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200511290146.html
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1796073,00.html
http://www.news24.com/News24/Technology/News/0,,2-13-1443_1842279,00.html
http://euobserver.com/9/20434
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/11/28/climate.change.ap/