Barrel Strength

Bill Bell, do you you have a PayPal account?

<http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/citizens-buying-advertising-against-climate-change-politics/>

Declan McCullagh at CBSNews.com may be the only mainstream journalist covering the only real climate story – fortunately, he is excellent.

Nothing like a little betrayal for that second morning hangover.

In his letter from Copenhagen, Michael M’Gonigle, formerly a lawyer for Greenpeace, argues that the Copenhagen Treaty should fail, essentially because it cannot go far enough:

“The only outcome that matters in the end is on how we can redirect this new energy to where it actually needs to be — from the partial restraints of Copenhagen to full blown eco-conversion. Copenhagen is a story of many contradictions, but the need to “lose” at Copenhagen in order to expand the momentum for this conversion is the biggest of the bunch.”

M’Gonigle argues that the proposed treaty will set minimums (reductions of CO2 emissions)  that will inevitably become maximums, so that the lowest common denominator of all countries becomes the maximum that any one of them is bound by treaty to achieve.

“One last lesson: even minimal targets are meant to be missed. We have seen this with the Kyoto Protocol.”

M’Gonigle continues:

“If you were to pass around a single piece of information at Copenhagen, it should be the two pages of graphs at the beginning of an interesting book written by Gus Speth, this generation’s leading environmental bureaucrat in Washington D.C. The book is The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability. Speth sets out 16 hockey stick graphs that portray increases in water use, in the damning of rivers, in CO2 concentrations, ozone depletion (hopefully now slowing down), rates of increase in average surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere, the rising frequency of great floods, depletion of ocean ecosystems, loss of rainforests, biodiversity decline, increases in fertilizer and paper consumption, and the explosion in the number of motor vehicles.

“And three others: growth in the size of the global economy (GDP), foreign direct investment, and population.

“Together, these graphs — all hockey sticks — provide a single message. We are killing the earth in every way imaginable, getting rich in the process, and providing a model for a growing world population to join in on.”

You can agree or disagree with the observation that “we are killing the earth in every way imaginable”. The points I am making about this letter from Copenhagen are that:

1) no sooner is the CO2 scandal exposed than the topic changes; and

2) not all of these problems are imaginary. Some, in fact, are based on real events, such as ocean fish depletion, deforestation, and riverine pollution. Do you remember cod?

But to the extent that public attention shifts to possibly real problems and away from certainly unreal ones, we might  all, just possibly, benefit.