*I'm glad this Monbiot guy has finally figured out that government and the international community are not sustainable.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/09/20/the-process-is-dead/
... there is not a single effective instrument for containing manmade global warming anywhere on earth. The response to climate change, which was described by Lord Stern as “a result of the greatest market failure the world has seen”(7), is the greatest political failure the world has ever seen.
Nature won’t wait for us. The US government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that the first eight months of 2010 were as hot as the first 8 months of 1998 - the warmest ever recorded(8). But there’s a crucial difference. 1998 had a record El Nino - the warm phase of the natural Pacific temperature oscillation. The 2010 El Nino was smaller (an anomaly peaking at roughly 1.8, rather than 2.5C), and brief by comparison to those of recent years(9). Since May the oscillation has been in its cool phase (La Nina)(10): even so, June, July and August this year were the second warmest on record(11). The stronger the warnings, the less capable of action we become.
Where does this leave us? How should we respond to the reality we have tried not see: that in 18 years of promise and bluster nothing has happened? Environmentalists tend to blame themselves for these failures. Perhaps we should have made people feel better about their lives. Or worse. Perhaps we should have done more to foster hope. Or despair. Perhaps we were too fixated on grand visions. Or techno-fixes. Perhaps we got too close to business. Or not close enough. The truth is that there is not and never was a strategy certain of success, as the powers ranged against us have always been stronger than we are.
Greens are a puny force, by comparison to industrial lobby groups, the cowardice of governments and the natural human tendency to deny what we don’t want to see. To compensate for our weakness, we indulged a fantasy of benign paternalistic power, acting, though the political mechanisms were inscrutable, in the wider interests of humankind. We allowed ourselves to believe that, with a little prompting and protest, somewhere, in a distant institutional sphere, compromised but decent people would take care of us. They won’t. They weren’t ever going to do so. So what do we do now?
I don’t know. These failures have exposed not only familiar political problems, but deep-rooted human weakness. All I know is that we must stop dreaming about an institutional response that will never materialise and start facing a political reality we’ve sought to avoid. The conversation starts here.
