Blog.

The wrong quote

Written by Kieran Battles. 20 December 2009

Today, much like yesterday, a billion fellow humans remain hungry, struggling (and many thousands failing) to live on less than a dollar a day. Just a few hours away on a cheap flight, bailed out bankers are days from their billion pound Christmas bonuses. Those of us who have jobs after the global economic meltdown continue to pay our taxes to keep banks like RBS afloat while they dismantle what’s left of our future by funding Canada’s tar sand oil production. We stare into the abyss of a global ecological meltdown and what political will can it muster? None.

It is not necessary to analyse the detail of Copenhagen’s climate agreement to conclude it has failed us. All of us. As disappointment subsides, anger begins. For, as certain as its failure came to bear it seems we continue to career with equal certainty toward the irreversible climate change that awaits us all 84 months from now.

We will look back at this summit and ask why? Why could they save the banks and not our planet? When it is too late we will look to the Prime Ministers and Presidents, particularly those still grasping their Nobel statuettes, and ask what were they thinking?

On October 9th President Obama accepted the Nobel prize as “as a call to action, a call for all nations to confront the challenges of the 21st century." Climate change is our greatest challenge and he has not confronted it. When all climate hell breaks loose sometime around December 2016 it will become clear that the man who captured the hearts of minds of our planet also sealed its fate.

But of course, he is not alone in this mass dereliction of duty. On my TV screen yesterday I heard Ed Miliband quote one of Churchill’s famous wartime addresses when he offered that Copenhagen represented the “end of the beginning”. Perhaps he meant the beginning of the end of arctic sea ice, the end of glaciers that supply drinking water to billions of the world’s population, the end of South Asia and Africa and the end of millions of species and millions of lives. This is what the science tells us will happen. This is the future their failure has succeeded in securing.

I am tired of their rhetoric. I am sick of their posturing. I am scared by their inability to act. 6 billion of us put our future in the hands of 100 heads of state and asked that they deliver. They did not, and never was so little owed by so many to so few.