“It is not real in any language. We are looking for accountable language and numbers. I might be be a rock star, but I can count.”
Bono

He is talking about the G8 announcement on aid for AIDS in Africa, a 25 page document that manages to have no committments whatsoever in it, but he might as well be talking about the Bush global warming ‘initiative’.
These announcements are nothing more than disinformation, stalls and denial campaigns, in other words, carefully crafted lies designed to keep us from actually doing anything. This has become a pattern among politicians of all stripes worldwide. The problem is that we face a worldwide, long term crisis that requires concrete collective action now. And the nationalistic political systems we have in place are simply not up to the task of working on a global scale.
As a capitalist, I think the best hope is that some of the major multi-national businesses realize it is in their interest to deal with this, not waiting for governments to act. This may be driven by profit or the need to protect their markets but it has to happen. Unfortunately the big oil companies are collectively short-sighted from a strategic perspective because they know that nothing can replace the short term cash cow they are riding. Until they come around and stop their lobbying and funding of massive disinformation campaigns, progress will be slow and deadly.
I realize that my statements regarding global corporations will horrify some but I have to ask: Who else is going to lead it? There is a reason why most speculative fiction (near term sci-fi) writers usually project a world run by global conglomerates- they cannot see any other obvious future.

I’ve been seeing the word mitigate being used more and more as we expand the dialogue regarding what we can actually do about climate change. For example today, in an article about a UN report on the melting of ice all over the world from the BBC there is this statement:

“Without taking measures to mitigate sea level rise, an estimated 145 million people, primarily in Asia, would be exposed to the risk of flooding.”

Just what exactly do they think this means? With one sentence there is the implication that there are solutions to these kinds of catastrophic changes. We can’t ‘mitigate’ the effects of glaciers melting in the Himalaya. Millions of people will lose their only sources of water. We can’t mitigate the effects of the Greenland icecap melting and raising sea levels several feet. We simply cannot ward off these types of changes. They are too global and too irreversible.
The problem here is political. Saying things like mitigate avoids discussion of the very real and hard choices we will face in the next 40-50 years.
And that’s a conservative estimate. Ask the Alaskan villagers whose towns have been destroyed by melting permafrost about ‘mitigation’. There isn’t any. The ground was solid and now it’s not. How do you mitigate that?

Derrick Jackson of the Boston Globe compares NASA chief Michael Griffin’s astoundingly ignorant comments this week to the situation Rachel Carson faced when trying to warn of the long term dangers of DDT back in the 60s. Then it was chemical companies blithely assuring us of the wonders of pesticides. Today it is Bush appointed lackeys undermining the efforts of real scientists.
The pattern here is one that the Bush machine has used effectively since 9/11: Muddy the discussion with misleading statements and proposals that are designed to slow any progress. The recent disruption of G8 talks on cutting emissions by an undefined ‘plan’ announced by Bush is a prime example.

Franke James is a genius and we have rocks in our heads. I can’t add any more to this because it is perfect.