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Why do climate change talks fail ?

The Vortex of Violence and why we are losing the war on climate change is now available in Kindle and Kobo book stores.

Congratulations to the Emir of Qatar

Copy of email sent the Qatar Embassy in London

Dear Ambassador,

I would to like send my congratulations to your new Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Khalifa al Thanion, for taking over from his father and maintaining the integrity of the dynasty.  I am sure the people of Qatar are equally delighted and pleased at avoiding the degrading process of going to election booths to decide for themselves.  

I can’t help but notice how young and virile your new leader is. At 33 years old he is just a bit older than Kim Jong Un; another person who successfully is maintaining a family dynasty. Not that I would ever suggest there is any comparison between the two.  

I will be posting this email on my blog if you want to have a look. The address is http://kevsclimatecolumn.blogspot.co.uk/. It would be nice if your new Emir could get chance to read it. However it is blocked in Qatar. Please pass the link on to him so that when he flies to the UK in his private jet he can read it.  I know that he will busy with his investments here, but it won’t take too much of his time.

I am sure that your censors must have made a mistake.  I only write on climate change, the military industrial complex, human rights, war and the linkages between them. I am sure that these are all topics dear to your new Sheikh’s heart. 

I know he must be interested in climate change as Qatar was proud to invite people from all over the world for last the climate change conference.  I do understand that under your chairmanship it disastrously delivered nothing and moved the world one step closer to cooking; still mistakes like this can happen to the best of us.  I also hope your new Emir is not too embarrassed by ruling a country with the world’s highest per capita carbon footprint when runaway climate change is killing thousands of people by the day.  Hopefully, the comfort of his private jets and luxury homes will stop him worrying too much.

I would also like to wish your new Sheikh good luck with all the new military hardware he is buying. I am sure it will keep him very happy. I also understand that some of your military big wigs are coming to our Fairford Air Tattoo this year to buy even more stuff. With a bit of luck I might be able to meet them to ask how their arms sales will protect your country and the world from climate change. I don’t quite understand how they will, but as your new Emir is so clever I am sure he can explain it. Good job that your country managed to derail climate change talks and you kept your oil and gas sales up, because without these you could never buy all this hardware.

Pass my congratulations to your new Emir on securing the World Cup and I hope your bid for the Olympics is successful. Qatar is a much better place for these events than Brazil as you don’t have to worry about impoverishing your people. They are all filthy rich and if they did complain you can always shoot them.  The people impoverished through the climate change these events help us ignore all live in poor or war torn countries, such as Syria, Lybia, Tunisa and Eygpt which have all suffered massive food price spikes. Wait a minute, isn’t that the Arab Spring countries whose revolutions Qatar did so much to support? Maybe I am making a silly mistake.

Anyway, enough of this. All I can say is good luck to your Emir’s continued abuse of human rights and conspicuous consumption. May he continue to buy lots of weapons to secure his hold on power and keep our most destructive corporations in power.

I am sure you must be delighted to be representing him,

Kevin Lister

Why do climate change talks fail

Why do climate change talks fail? If the eighteenth round of talks failed, can we expect the 19th to succeed?  Why are all nations collectively committing mutual suicide? Why are we ignoring the science of climate change? Why do we not care about our children? What can we do? What sequence of events must we demand to make progress? Is the concept of the nation state dead?

These fundamental questions are addressed in "The Vortex of Violence and why we are losing the war on climate change."

Kindle version available here

Hard copy available here



Preface 

Chapter 1 - No hope, false hope, some hope - the three witches of the apocalypse

Despite much talk that climate change means the existing business and economic system cannot be maintained, governments will do all in their power to maintain business as usual and use what ever mendacious means are necessary.

Chapter 2 - Dreams and realities

Atmospheric CO2 is building up super-exponentially. In about 10 years it will be above 450 ppm, at which point runaway climate change will be impossible to avoid. Our highly connected infrastructure is based around dangerous chemical and nuclear plants putting the planets risk exposure far in excess of anything the planet has seen in the past. 

Chapter 3 - Why climate change agreements are not working

The objective of international agreements on climate change is to limit CO2 emissions without any consideration of how this impacts the competitive environment that nations must survive within. It is a strategy doomed to failure.

Chapter 4 - What happens when nuclear weapons meet climate change?

There are three questions that nuclear weapon states should be forced to answer, (1) Will climate change make nuclear disarmament more difficult? (2) As economies collapse from climate change will nuclear weapon states be able to afford to maintain their weapons systems safe from attack and accident? (3) On the assumption that nuclear weapons are not used, will they become an eternal liability for the survivors struggling to make ends meet in the new hostile and dystopian environment that climate change will bring? No nation should progress nuclear weapons development until there has been public discussion and agreement on these questions.

Chapter 5 - Can democracy survive climate change?

Our understanding of democracy is that we should have freedom and be allowed to develop economically, but tackling climate change requires all of society to operate within strict limits imposed by a falling ecological ceiling. Nobody has any real option to vote for a party that will make sustaining civilisation its priority and determining how we should operate within fixed limits, instead all political parties merely offer different choices for preserving industrial growth. As a result, our ideals of human democracy have been replaced with the reality of an industrialised democracy.

Chapter 6 - Segmented problems or homogeneous solutions

We are conditioned from early childhood to be able to compartmentalise our thinking, and this forms the basis of the education systems in the industrial economices. It has the unintended consequence of encouraging us to find solutions to the three critical problems of today, climate change, nuclear disarmament and economic reform individually. If we continue to do this, the chance of success in any one is about 9E-63, about the same as selecting a single atom from all the atoms that make planet earth.

Chapter 7 - The War we are in and ecological overshoot

The nation state is essentially a war making entity, yet the nation state wars against the people of other nation states belong to the past, largely as a result of highly interconnected economies and the terror of nuclear conflict. Instead we have intractable  wars among the people virtually everywhere and these are differentiated only by the level of violence. These challenge the concept and viability of the nationstate, as the combatants of these wars fall into either pro-growth and anti-growth market states. Today the nation state is subservient to the pro-growth market states.

Chapter 8 - What happens next and what do we do about it?

Strategic choices are never easy to take. We must firstly integrate climate change, nuclear disarmement and financial reform. We must put nuclear weapons on the climate change negotiating table and this forces entire global political system to change. Key institutions such as the UN P-5 need to be replaced and a modern day alternative to the failed Baurch Agreement must be strived for. These will not guarantee success, but failure to do so will guarantee failure.

Chapters, completed book and research materials will also be published on www.nucli.biz