It’s finally the end of the Copenhagen climate change summit. I don’t know about anyone else, but I had my hopes up. After almost two weeks of high-level collaborative teamwork you’d expect something more to show for it than the sooty remains of a huge carbon footprint. To be fair, our world leaders have come up with an insight that is staggering in its implications (see #2… no pun intended): “Deep cuts in global emissions are required.” I thought we already figured that part out. Oh snap! But wait, there’s more! The U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon tells us that, “although the accord may not be what everyone had hoped for, it is a beginning.” Apparently Kyoto is now passé; in 1997, I thought it was a beginning. In spite of my disappointment at the outcome of the conference, however, I can rest easy because Canada’s Minister of the Environment, Jim Prentice, assures me that this not legally binding accord is “an excellent agreement.” With Canada’s record of escalating carbon emissions each year since the Kyoto Accord was signed – a 27% increase from 1990 benchmark levels – how can I not feel good about this?

The rationale for holding the Copenhagen climate change summit is reasonable and sound. However, it is based upon a faulty premise. As the bellicose and abrasive Hugo Chavez succinctly stated (9:09 of video), “If the climate were a bank, it would have been saved already.” His comment goes directly to the source of the problem. The summit was doomed to fail from the beginning because the world’s economy is still based upon capitalistic ideals that have jeopardized our planetary weather system. This is similar to the alcoholic whose behaviour can no longer be swept under the rug, and so to get people off his back agrees to limit his intake. Like the disingenuous drunkard, our capitalistic ethos is stock full of justifications, and will continue along the same path it has been following for the last 200 years. Rather than watching a world congress meet to solve climate problems created by the reckless and wasteful exploitation of fossil fuels, we have witnessed instead the Plummet Summit: this is the point beyond which there is no hope. It is where we had our last opportunity to change direction, but opted to follow the business as usual paradigm. We have, in effect, jumped off a cliff – we are now simply waiting to hit the ground.

Some of the most dangerous ground to tread is that of ideology. People will often stop thinking when their beliefs are criticized. They get defensive, buttress the ramparts, and pull up the drawbridge. In order to achieve our goal of carbon neutrality, we need to change the very system we live in. We recently watched the fall of communism as the wall between East and West Berlin crumbled. Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, we have also just witnessed the fall of capitalism with the recent global meltdown. Had capitalism not tapped deep into the darkest parts of humanity’s nature, namely greed, it would have failed to recover any semblance of its former state. Had the world governments not injected huge sums of money into the financial institutions, we wouldn’t be talking about any kind of economic recovery. The economy hasn’t recovered. In fact, it never will. Another catastrophic failure is certain to follow the one we are still in because nothing has changed. The foundations of the economic system are sand, and we need to dig this one down to bedrock if we want to affect any kind of worthwhile and lasting change.

Sustainability and capitalism are not compatible frameworks: one is based on growth, while the other seeks a balance with the natural world. If greed is removed from the equation, it becomes very difficult to imagine anyone choosing capitalism as groundwork on which to build a society. If we consider the more enduring qualities that each system embodies, it becomes clear which one most people would choose. Capitalism’s legacy has gotten us to Copenhagen because of its need to degrade the environment, subjugate nations and eradicate species. Sustainability, on the other hand, is the earth’s natural state: it requires no justification. It simply awaits the humility of our acceptance of this fact, welcomes actions aligned with it, and all the horrors we have visited upon her will be forgiven.

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Tags: climate change, copenhagen summit, Environment, global warming

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 3rd, 2010 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Economy, Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.