Please Stop Talking about Climate Change

It's not just the carbon dioxide emssions associated with the thousands of flights to Bali from around the globe that could be saved if these farcical international negotiations were abandoned once and for all. There would be all the additional hot air produced by over-excited and sweaty men posturing at each other like shaved gorillas. And all that extra methane produced by all those excessive summit-of-extravagance dinners.

Of all the infuriations that arose in my troubled breast during the tortuous days of the Bali discussions the most poignant was the coincidence of the signing of the 'Lisbon' EU treaty, a day before all the HoGs had to be in Brussels, meaning that they had to fly specially to Lisbon only for the tacky signing ceremony, accompanied by lift music. A vast outpouring of C02 just to inflate some Portuguese egos.

I know there are some good people involved in these talks, and I truly wish them well, but the angrier and baser part of me just wishes they would all just fucking shut up. The sight of their hypocritical staged concern while they destroy my planet is more destructive to my soul than can be soothed by the minuscule progress that may have been achieved. How many of those participating are unaware that they can never get anywhere because the negotiators are in hock to the economic interests that cannot tackle climate change without voluntartily giving away their wealth and power?

The pictures show the signatories in Lisbon and the negotiators at Bretton Woods, where this whole crazy system started in 1944. We will never solve the one without addressing the other. A money system based on debt and enforcing geometric economic growth can enver be compatible with sustainability. (I couldn't find a photo of the actual negotiators in Bali - please help if you can). How much has power shifted in the past 60 years: one female out of 27 is an infinite improvement, mathematically, over the no women at all around the table in 1944.


Perhaps the most dangerous thing about negotiations such as those at Bali is the temptation to be sucked into all that displacement activity while what we should be doing is taking the power back into our own hands and sorting out our own economic and social realities. Planet-saving begins at home, not on some paradise island. Tweet