(Update: On 11 Oct 2021 the Reed College Board of Trustees announced its decision to divest the college’s endowment from fossil fuels. Read about it here.)
With Hurricane Sandy behind us (except if you live in those forgotten parts of America called New York or New Jersey), Americans are revving up their furnaces, cars, Xmas light displays, and hopping aboard airplanes to visit family. Lucky us.
Reuters (Despair after climate conference, Dec 9) reminds us, though, that not everyone is so lucky.
Kieren Keke, foreign minister of the island nation of Nauru (pop. 9,322), told Reuters, “Much much more is needed if we are to save this process from being simply a process for the sake of process, a process that simply provides for talk and no action, a process that locks in the death of our nations, our people, and our children.”
Indeed, there has been very little international cooperation on the very largest of global problems and even that little bit of cooperation is fragmenting. The Kyoto protocol has been abandoned by Canada, Russia, and Japan. The US never ratified it. And developing countries, like China and India, were never obliged to participate in it.
So while we fiddle at our holiday parties, the world will continue to heat up. Reuters reported, “A series of reports released during the Doha talks said the world faced the prospect of 4 degrees Celsius (7.2F) of warming, rather than the 2 degree (3.6F) limit that nations adopted in 2010 as a maximum to avoid dangerous changes. … According to the World Bank, that would mean food and water shortages, habitats wiped out, coastal communities wrecked by rising seas, deserts spreading, and droughts both more frequent and severe. Most impact would be borne by the world’s poorest.”
Happy holidays.
