My recommendation is this: If the developing nations want a change in attitudes, they should strategize as an economic force. Hire a guy like Max Keiser, economist extraordinaire with lots of experience in Wall street itself, as consultant and get to work. The developed world needs the poor for all kinds of reasons I don't want to go into here. But trust me -- in this situation there is all kinds of leverage! It is like a house of cards. How did Jesus say it again about the "first" and the "last"?
For now, with the economy in shambles, Obama has put all his eggs in the basket of military power and Wall street War profiteers, and goes all the way to Oslo to pontificate not about peace --but about just war. To my ears, Obama's words never sounded more hollow or Orwellian, and I hope that, after study of the facts, the Nobel committee will see the gravity of devaluing the Nobel Peace price by prematurely awarding it to Obama, and call him loudly on his mistakes and if necessary, take away his price. Things of that magnitude, The Nobel Peace Price, have to have meaning....
It is no wonder that Cap and Trade is the preferred option for the developed world. Cap and trade monetizes the Climate, and capital interests will see opportunities to make money -- but this model doesn't do anything for the understanding of the real issues here.....the fulcrum of pollution, consumption, inequality and their relationship to environmental degradation (and vice versa). Climate change and it devastating economic impact, already is the primal cause of conflict. Access to water is in dispute everywhere -- most likely even in your own city or state, and certainly between nations. To think that one can just walk away from Copenhagen without taking responsibility for the ensuing unraveling of civilization is naive.
The delegates of the developing nations want results: commitments on "climate debt", commitments on reparations and the financing of a green leap frog development program that puts developing nations on the very vanguard of new green technologies. Ten billion will not do that: "it will not be enough to pay for the coffins that will be necessary", as one of the African delegates remarked. They had been thinking that minimally 195 billion per year will do the trick. A sum like that could actually easily be raised in a very simple and effective manner, and here is the idea:
Tax Carbon (gas, coal, oil) at every stage it changes hands. And tax the end-consumer most. Put these funds coming in mainly from the consuming nations -- the rich, into an internationally administrated fund dominated by the interests of developing nations. The fund will provide for an equitable transference of wealth through restoration, conservation, and reparation of the natural world and the human habitat within it. It will address the needs of the many -- not the few.
(I don't know who could run such a fund, I would like to think it is the UN).
Technologies, and leap frog development into a green transformation of energy and sustainable agriculture practices, water management, etc., employing many -- they all need to come from this fund. The management of this huge fund will aspire to the values of equality and justice throughout, and its sole task is to make immediate investments on the local level --globally. The fund will dedicate its work to the 7 generations to come.
The responsibilities here would be awesome. We will be forced to widen our focus and invite religious principles here to avoid widespread conflict and lift the whole impasse out of its confinements. True religious leaders of all kinds should have a role in the vision of a good live for all and keep the discussions on track by infusing it with a spiritual calling. The Green patriarch for example has defined certain acts against nature a sin...... Now that is a new beginning..... A glimpse of a Post Capitalist World.
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