Godot Actually Made It To Copenhagen … and Nothing Happened. Now What?

December 22, 2009

In the wake of the shambles at Copenhagen, we could do worse than contemplate Vladimir and Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The two characters converse endlessly and anxiously, while they wait for the mysterious Godot to arrive and secure their enlightenment. But Godot never shows up, even though he keeps sending word that he will.

Trapped in the Theater of the Absurd, Vladimir and Estragon are at least ennobled by fidelity to their vain hope. We’re much worse off, because our Godot – aka Barack Obama – actually showed up at Copenhagen. And, in one day, the vain hope of the world’s collective Vladimirs and Estragons was revealed to be just that.

Here’s the final score, as tabulated by Climateinteractive.org. We need a binding emissions limit that will keep the 21st-century temperature increase below 1.5° C. But Copenhagen produced nothing except a sheaf of non-binding “commitments” which, even if they actually materialized, would produce an increase of 3.9 ° C. And actual emissions are on track toward 4.8° C. Both these figures are, to put it simply, catastrophic for everybody: developing countries, developed countries — everybody.

Not so, say the post-Copenhagen press releases from Washington, Beijing and other capitals. With florid prose worthy of Mr. Micawber, the imprisoned debtor in Dickens’ David Copperfield, they unite in assuring us that “something will turn up.” That something will apparently be revealed at a future conference, date as yet unspecified.
A charming thought but, as our leaders may have noticed, they are playing to an empty theater now that Godot has failed to deliver.

So let’s face it. After the default at Copenhagen, we can see that the world’s “responsible” national authorities will not acknowledge the tipping point so powerfully evoked by Jim Hansen, Bill McKibbon and others. If we go past this point, we will be helpless spectators as the climate system shifts to a hot state that our civilization will not survive. And no serious person who has actually considered the science can dismiss the significant possibility that the tipping point is real, and quite near.

Confronted by this stark reality, we have to ditch Godot and move on. The floor is open for suggestions – I’ll offer some myself in the coming weeks.

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1. Steven Earl Salmony Says:
   December 25th, 2009 at 10:45 am

   Dear David Wheeler,

   Some day soon, I hope you and other splendid journalists will find adequate ways to directly acknowledge the global challenges of our times by helping us “connect the dots” between human overconsumption, overproduction and overpopulation activities on one hand and climate destabilization, natural resource dissipation and and environmental degradation on the other.

   It seems to me that any “truth” about Earth’s ecology and climate science need to be coupled with the best available science about human population dynamics and the human overpopulation of our planetary home.

   When the moment of ‘throwing out life preservers’ occurs, it will probably be too late for human action to do anything meaningful about the human-forced global threats that once loomed ominously before the human family. Time will have been wasted. We will have been fiddlin’ while Earth’s environs were destroyed for human habitation and its resources were being recklessly depleted. Father Greed will have effectively ravaged Mother Nature. Although global threats had called out to leaders for global interventions, there were no transformational leaders (except Barack Obama) and international institutions (including the United Nations) empowered with adequate authority to promote necessary change.

   At bottom, while there was still time to make a difference, many too many leading environmentalists, politicians, economic powerbrokers, talking heads in the mass media and other public opinion shapers colluded in stony silence and did not speak out loudly and clearly about the colossal threat that is posed to the family of humanity by the gigantic scale and skyrocketing growth of human population numbers now overspreading the surface of Earth.

   Threats to human wellbeing and environmental health cannot be reasonably addressed and sensibly overcome until the root causes of the threats are acknowledged, validated by science, and widely shared in the human community, I suppose.

   Very best regards,

   Steve Salmony

2. Steven Earl Salmony Says:
   December 27th, 2009 at 3:04 pm

   Too many so-called leaders engaging in too much happy talk, posing before too many cameras, and deceiving many too many people. Nero is reported to have behaved similarly by putting on a show: fiddlin’ while Rome burned. Leaders in our time have adopted the ruinous strategy of Nero.

3. Per Kurowski Says:
   January 5th, 2010 at 5:10 pm

   The wonderful fiasco in Copenhagen

   The fiasco in Copenhagen could not have been more wonderful! Now we citizens know that if there is a real serious environmental threat to our planet, be that global warming, global cooling or whatever, we cannot really trust our governments or our currently self appointed civil society representatives to take care of it. The governments because the politician’s primary wish is to be reelected and that is a short term goal that overrides any long term consideration, and the civil society organizations because it would seem that more often than not they carry a different political agenda

   And so what are we citizens to do. As I see we need first to treat the climate change threat as being a challenge to the whole human race and which means that all humans beings, all indigenous to this our planet, have the right and the obligation to share in its solution. In other words, climate change must become a global citizen’s issue.

   This above has implications, the first having to recognize that even though the average carbon emission varies dramatically between humans in rich and developed countries from those in poor and developing ones, the marginal damage per each new emission is the same whoever produces it.

   One of the worst things we saw happening in Copenhagen was how the climate change threat was utilized to argue for global social justice, not that there is anything wrong with global social justice, but that certainly obscures the urgent objective at hand. Any transfer of climate change fighting resources from the rich to the poor, which of course must occur, should be strictly based on these resources have a greater green impact there. It is not a question of having the poor and developing countries to be able to consume their fair share of cars, but more that of creating alternatives to cars, like extensive railroad systems.

4. Bob Armstrong Says:
   January 6th, 2010 at 3:54 pm

   This is written as if the eco-leninist fraud against the gas which forms half the respiratory cycle of the planet has not been thoroughly exposed .

   One hopes the naked anti-life , anti-science , anti-freedom power greed displayed will infect the \cult of the state\ with a bit of humility which will help restore the preeminence of free minds making decisions in free markets .

5. janvandersteeg@gmail.com Says:
   January 10th, 2010 at 11:12 am

   Dear David,

   After the historical speech by Hu Jiangtao at the General Assembly of the UN last September, offering 40 to 45% reduction of CO2 intensity, Copenhagen is a disappointment. (Just like Obama’s respons at the UN GA in September was). China’s offer is really magnificent: even if they continue an economic growth of 10% for the coming decade, their per capita emissions (by 2020 7 to 8 ton/capita) are still far below the USA.

   Let me take the floor to propose two alternative tracks, hopefully both will be pursued in parallel.

   Plan A. Continuation of the current friendly route. American civil society (you, Al gore, Jim Hansen) have to get the message across to US Congres that:
   a) their decisions on CO2 (and other GHG) emissions not only have consequences for their voters but also for the other 95% of mankind and that they are morally accountable for their (in)actions.
   b) climate change depends on the GHG concentrations in the atmosphere, not current emissions: the USA has emitted three times more CO2 than China, and on a per capita basis more than an order of magnitude more. Therefore the USA has the duty to reduce their emissions now: -30% in 2020 (compared to 1990, not 20005) and -95% in 2050, without conditions on China. Of course efforts by China or any other developing country are more than welcome, but not a valid condition for the USA to take reduction measures.

   I wish you, Al, Jim and other responsible Americans good luck. (Really, this is not cynically)

   Plan B. Economic Sanctions.
   The EU should sit together with the Japanese and Chinese to force the USA into responsible GHG behaviour through making credit to the USA CO2 dependent and by putting heavy CO2 taxes on all US imports.

   I fear plan B is the only way to save the livelihood on planet Earth.

   yours, ir. Jan van der Steeg, The Netherlands.

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