The Age of Stupid: Coming soon to a theater near you

[FayeforCure]

uhhh...yea. The title sounds fairly appropriate  .

Agreed. We have a great OPPORTUNITY in front of us:

The Copenhagen Climate Change Summit,  the 15th. UN Conference of Parties to the climate change convention, meets in Copenhagen in December to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto Convention which expires in 2012.

The challenge now is to build on the scientific consensus and public awareness campaigns run by Al Gore and many others, to the processes of political mobilisation.  The EU will meet it's Kyoto targets of an 8% renewable energy by 2010 and has 30 programmes in place to achieve a 20% renewable target by 2020.

The costs of inaction (5 to 20% of Global GDP) greatly outweigh the costs of action (+/- 1% of GDP) and there is a demonstrable geographical overlap between areas where climate change is hitting hardest (droughts, famines, coastal risks and demographic pressures), and increased military conflicts.  Climate change needs to be seen as not just as an environmental issue, but as an economic, human rights, political and security issue as well.


Denmark has achieved a position of world leadership in wind power technology, with c. 40% of the world market in wind turbine technology thanks to a public policy of support for R&D and feed in tariffs to encourage early and widespread adoption of the technology.  20% of Danish electricity is now produced from wind with c. 86% of all wind turbines in Denmark owned by hundreds of thousands of families belonging to local wind farm cooperatives.


However Greenpeace expects the COP15 conference to adopt a "greenwash" plan which falls far short of the targets required to limit global temperature growth to the 2 degrees Celsius required to reduce the risks of catastrophic "tipping point events" threatening the survival of many small island states to below 50%.  In their view greenhouse gas emissions would have to be reduced by 40% (industrialised states) and 15-30%  (developing states) together with the ending of net deforestation by 2020 to have a reasonable chance of success.


The role of bloggers in all this, it was suggested, was to hold politicians accountable for the national targets they had adopted, and not to let them away with the usual evasion strategies which always seek to blame someone else for not doing enough to address the problem.  Many communities in Denmark and elsewhere were showing that it was possible to be carbon neutral and the time for waiting until someone else came up with more ambitious targets is long gone.

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/9/23/785403/-Copenhagen-Climate-Change-Summit-and-sustainable-living