Back to square one on climate change
By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com
"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Doha is the capital of Qatar, a small state (est. pop just under a million) in the Persian Gulf. In recent years Doha, in spite of, or more likely because of, its diminutive footprint, has become the place where the nations of the world come to discuss, debate and decide (or not) huge real-world questions that have consequences for billions of people alive or not yet born.
It happens that Doha means big tree in Arabic. Last weekend, a redwood-sized tree fell in Doha. It should have made a massive sound. Or not; did you hear it? Chances are that if you live in the United States and are not a news junkie you heard at best only a distant, insignificant noise.
Yet that was the sound of the nations of the world squandering yet one more opportunity –one of the last if not the last – to face the reality of climate change already evident all around us, and to decide to make the radical changes needed Now!
The U.S. media hardly detected the sound waves or connected the dots of what happened – or rather did not happen – in Doha and what did happen in Downtown Manhattan and all across this nation’s most densely populated area (arguably also the most economically significant megalopolis in the world) as a result of a wild and wooly hurricane named Sandy.
Don’t take it from me. Christopher F. Schuetze who wrote an article titled, “Ignoring Planetary Peril, a Profound ‘Disconnect’ Between Science and Doha,” in Sunday’s New York Times, located in the epicenter of Sandy’s devastation, stating: “The American news media reported little on the climate talks, compared with Europe.”
It’s not as if the Doha climate meeting was a roundtable of scientific geeks long on technical issues lacking in drama. To quote the same Times article: “In one of the most poignant moments of the Doha climate talks, the Philippine climate change commissioner, Naderev M. Sano, appealed to his fellow negotiators at a session deciding the contours of the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol.
‘“Please let Doha be remembered as the place where we found the political will to turn things around,’” he said as he choked back tears.
“Just days before, Typhoon Bopha had hit the Philippines, killing hundreds of people. The typhoon, having been both unusually forceful and out of season, was deemed – like Hurricane Sandy – to be an extreme weather event, exacerbated by climate change.
“Despite the pleas of the Philippine commissioner and those of many others, the Doha summit was almost politics as usual,” wrote Schuetze.
Why the silence? A different Times news report, written by John Broder, offers the standard U.S. excuse:
“It has long been evident that the United Nations talks were at best a partial solution to the planetary climate change problem, and at worst an expensive sideshow. The most effective actions to date have been taken at the national, state and local levels, with a number of countries adopting aggressive emissions reductions programs and using cap-and-trade programs or other means to help finance them.”
Really, to whom is this “fact” self-evident? Not to the Filipinos and the “many others” whose pleas fell on deaf ears in Qatar. Not to the Europeans and their media, who to this day take and cover the UN climate forum seriously.
What is clear is that this “evidence,” like that for the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is convincing only to the United States government and the U.S. media. In other words, it is a lie convenient to the country that contributes by far more to climate change per capita than any other and whose corporations and politicians find it very inconvenient to do what the science shows must be done and in the way the vast inequality between nations practically and morally requires.
So if the leading player, the self-proclaimed “indispensable nation,” refuses to play on a court in which its predominance is diluted by all those inconvenient others, failure is guaranteed and what we have is a truth only of the self-fulfilling type.
Closer to the mark are environmentalists, who “charge that national economic interests took priority over the fight against global warming at Doha, even as an increasing number of people worldwide are becoming aware of the urgency of the problem.”
Thus, as a very big tree fell in Doha and hundreds of thousands of smaller ones in the northeastern United States, the U.S. media was consumed by such news as the morning sickness of an expectant British princess and the tragic suicide of a nurse at her hospital over nothing more than taking a phone call she mistakenly thought was from the Queen of England.
