"It Is Done"--Unless One Great Spirit Should Now Rise

Terence Stone

I must confess that following the "failure" of COP-15 in Copenhagen (2009), except for a hastily hammered out agreement between the US, Brazil, India, South Africa, and China, to obscure the word "failure", I crashed. After months of effort, along with millions of others around the world, to pressure for an urgent and just agreement on climate change the word “hopeless” entered my vocabulary.

The oil companies had spent many millions of dollars on a massive and coordinated disinformation campaign, supported by Canada and a few other countries set on nothing less than sabotage. Computer hacking for anything that could be quoted out of context was widespread. Eventually the oil industry backed hackers hit a little paydirt; but with a lot of spin, information obtained from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UK) was cited out of context as "proof" that climate change research was fraudulent.

Released just two weeks before the COP-15 Summit, the timing of the release couldn't have been more perfect. The great beast didn't slouch toward Bethlehem, but dropped into the centre of the conference on all fours; with coal-red eyes it crouched, drooling hot bitumen from its gaping maw and exuded a crude stench, observing all. Nobody attempted to remove or even name it; indeed, like the elephant in the living room, most pretended it just wasn't there. Of course, when investigations by six committees were concluded on the research of the CRU, its findings of climate change due to human activity were completely exonerated.

Another confession: When BP's Deep Water Horizon disaster happened on April 10, 2010, I was deeply shocked, as were all people of conscience. But as the weeks went by I began to hope fervently that every effort would fail--that the disaster would be of such an incomprehensible magnitude that the entire Eastern seaboard of the USA would be irreparably damaged for decades and that the shock would be global, jolting people out of their apathy; and that the world would at last see that there is no such thing as a "deep water horizon"--the only horizon we have encircles the globe and it is disappearing as the scant time we may have to act draws ever closer. Regrettably, all has been sucked into the black hole of officially mandated memory loss.

Since then, scientists who were climate sceptics have renounced their scepticism, or repudiated their paid-for lies, because the writing is in the sky. Disaster is afoot. Do you remember the movie, Asteroid, in which American (of course) super-heroes fly up to meet an asteroid on a course to destroy planet Earth? With just the right measure of technology, heroism and a nuclear bomb, Earth is saved. I recall a related discussion a few years ago in which and American (of course) suggested dealing with hurricanes of increasing power that threaten the coastal US (of course) by exploding a nuclear bomb in the eyes of these storms, thus blowing them to bits. Ha! Sorry America (of course), you can't blow climate change to bits like your fabricated enemies.

So here we are, two years later in the immediate aftermath of the COP-17 Summit in Durban with another complete "failure"--except an agreement to meet again to work toward an agreement that has been hailed by the major polluters as a success in order to obscure the word "failure". How can any of this make sense, even to those with the stupid-seal stamped on their foreheads? But let's name the main culprits--drugged-on-oil America (of course), cradling in its arms its tar-baby Canada.

The reality is that any agreement reached "quickly" would not be implementable before 2020. The next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report isn't due until 2013, by which time it will be reporting on findings for climate change that is roughly five years out of date. The problem is that each report so far has under-calculated the effects for the period it reports on. Essentially the message with each report is, "Surprise! Surprise! Everything's happening much faster than we thought--Mmmm!--Please excuse our conservative calculations".

You know what, I'm recycling stuff that everybody should know, but the majority doesn't care about; so I think I'll just shut up and leave you with a recycled poem for our disposable planet and its disposable human race and other life forms:

REQUIEM

The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
"Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do."

The irony would be  that we know what
we are doing.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
"It is done."
People did not like it here.

--Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country