Really Good News for Earth’s Inhabitants!

“The last train out of any station will not be full of nice guys”
Hunter S. Thompson

After twenty years of sitting on their thumbs wondering what was in it for them, world leaders, through the G8, came to some pretty astonishing accords that look like they will actually do something to ween the world from greenhouse gas emitting pollutants, and slow global warming. This is no small feat. If the accords hold, the result should be a significant slowing of warming, although that it will accomplish the 2 degrees over pre-industrial temperatures 2015 target is highly doubtful. Still, it will buy us more time to figure out the best way to proceed.

This was a “club” effort, outside the UN effort, but that’s probably why it will work. Any kind of progress is good news at this point.

Of course, they took advantage of every lousy loophole in the international system, so the result will mean very little to curbing CO2 and changing over to new energy and transportation infrastructures. What’s more important than that?

This quarter, of course! That makes them bastards, by Hunter’s definition.

Annie Leonard who brought us The Story of Stuff sums it up well in The Story of Cap & Trade:

After twenty years of non-effort in the US, after twenty years of the shanghai of our national politics by the entrenched fossil-fuel industries whose leaders have grown richer and richer, while everyone else has gotten poorer and sicker. Whose leaders have figured out how to use the national military to protect their foreign oil interests, Congress to wing subsidies their way, or exclude them (the fracking industry) from the Clean Air and Water Acts, while ‘we, the people’ suck it. After ten years of precipitous DECLINE in investment into alternative energy, due to the powerful oil and gas industry lobby mixed with the “free-market” nature of our elections these days, we can all be grateful that G8 leaders finally, FINALLY, found some profit for themselves in saving the world.

They will make a killing doing it too.