IT is nice to know 190 countries are on the same page as they create a barrier against global warming. The Lima initiative which ended up in a “done deal” with all members agreeing to work out plans to hold the mercury and submitting them before next year’s Paris summit can be seen as a first step. But is it too slow and is the approach a little too casual and informal for an issue that impacts on the planet period?
One would have thought there would be more severe guideline and at least some pressures on everyone to limit greenhouse gases and pollution. The decimation of forests, fracking for oil and de-stabilising the crust of the earth as well as stripping mountains in the search for coal do not need to be allowed to carry on regardless for another year.
Regrettably, there is very little push from 7 billion people who live on the planet and are directly affected by the adverse fallout of global warming. For most of the human race it is an abstract problem, there are no guns and bombs so we fail to understand its import. Yet, eco-terrorism, if one can stretch the point, is not a laughing matter. And let’s be very clear. There are victims. Of floods, of mountain slides, of hunger from crop failures, of a lack of potable water. We do not realize it until we have to pay the piper his price. Again, politically it does not excite nor, for that matter, does it ever come off the back burner where media is concerned. There is always a sort of fuzzy frame to this issue and we are blasé about it as if it wasn’t really such a problem.
But as deserts grow and forests sink, as rivers dry up and floods ravage the banks, as the 2 degree fall that we need so desperately to keep the balance is not reached, as talk replaces action there will be a reckoning.
Whether alternate forms of energy are the answer to the rape of the earth one cannot say but by 2050 we could be looking into the abyss and it will be a dark place indeed.
Even though environmental groups have already tagged the Lima meet as weak and ineffectual at least there is some tangible move to end the far too widely held belief that global warming is a myth or that it is part of some mystic cosmic cycle.
The fact is things are changing. The months, in one generation, do not reflect the same climate they did fifty years ago.
For bow, there is one aim in the agenda…to slow down the rising temperatures and keep the icebergs frozen in the circles. The 190 submissions form the members of their plans of action and the need to bridge the gap in priorities between the rich and poor nations will make meeting the Paris deadline an uphill enterprise.
