It's hard to know quite what to make of the outcome of the climate change negotiations in Bali. Certainly, there appears to have been more emotion on display than is customary at international environmental negotiations. The NYT article linked here does a good job of presenting a balanced summary, whilst highlighting some of the positive aspects that give cause for hope. Chief among them, the authors say, is the fact that a new US president will enter the fray half-way through the two-year negotiating round initiated in Bali - and most analysts agree that he or she will feel and respond to the pressure for a credible and meaningful outcome. So, deferred hope, perhaps?
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Thanks go to Reasons to be Hopeful reader, Milli, who sent me a link to a BBC article giving an upbeat account of the Bali negotiations. Unfortunately, by the end of today, the BBC had watered down the article's enthusiasm considerably! It, and the accompanying analysis by Richard Black, is still worth a read though: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7145608.stm. I also found an article closer to the original on a Bangladeshi news site: http://www.bangladesh-web.com/view.php?hidRecord=181219. Thanks so much, Milli!
You can send me links to positive news stories anytime you like, at: eazibee@gmail.com. I've also posted this contact email to the right hand side of the blog posts, for ongoing reference.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Day Sixty-Five: hang on... just two years to wait!
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3 comments:
The euphoria in the Bali conference room has not been universally echoed by environmentalists (or in the press). I agree that the most hopeful aspect of all this is that a new US president must surely have a more enlightened world view than GWB. But, in the short term, the pantomime brinkmanship of the US delegation has not won them many friends.
So hope deferred too far for you then, Harry?
I'm afraid I do not have much with which to reassure you - there seems to be little embarrassment here in the US, and the Bush administration appear to be spinning the Bali outcome as 'we saved the deal'! Having said all that, I think the NYT is correct that public pressure is gradually rising here and that any new president (Republican or Democrat) will have to step US action up a gear, with or without accompanying Chinese efforts.
On that point, though, I would have thought the state of the local environment in China has just about reached critical level - massive ground-level pollution, severely stressed water resources, toxins in fish and other foods... Sooner rather than later, industrial processing will have to clean itself up and a side-effect of this should be lower CO2 emissions...
How's that for putting a positive spin on things??!
E
You have missed your vocation. You could be a ground-breaking mathematician - I've never seen a circle squared so elegantly.
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