O Come, All Ye Bipeds!

The recent doings of our fellow two-legged ambulants confirm and reiterate how our curious and flawed race hurtles itself ever more eagerly toward collapse by the time-tested strategy of habitat destruction. We’re not the first species to undermine our existence by pooping in one another’s nests, and we won’t be the last.

George Monbiot, a well-known greenie, pens for today’s Guardian the speech that Barack Obama should be giving at the Copenhagen climate protection talks to stop them from collapsing around his ears. It’s a nice speech with good cadences and about as likely to be heard in Denmark this week as ghostly guffaws from King Knut the Great in a surprise cameo from the 11th century.

Monbiot says Obama should pledge American commitment to the difficult process of weaning itself off carbon fuels and boldly promise to shoulder a triple burden: employment upheaval, a new national industrial policy and massive investments in the technological advances needed—which Monbiot compared to the breakneck American efforts to shift to war production in the 1940s.

Ha ha ha.

What (overly toasty) planet does he live on? Monbiot can’t seriously expect any one of these three things to emerge from a country busily debating whether dinosaurs roamed the earth 6,000 years ago while sinking into a slough of opportunistic brinkmanship over how to find enough money somewhere in its $12 trillion annual GDP so that its citizens can take their kids to the doctor.

The G77 (poor and middling) countries threatened to pull the plug on the whole charade earlier this week when the big players refused to countenance binding goals. They’ve got nothing to lose as a continuation of current policy will see them sink literally as well as metaphorically.

The reports coming out of the Danish capital bear titles and headlines such as ‘Chaotic End Game’, ‘Denmark Gives Up’ and ‘Summit in Disarray’. What a surprise!

The corporations eager to undermine the whole accord have been busy and efficient, and their sounding board professional denialists whip up the teabagger crowd to oppose anything thousands of scientists agree on. If Jesus is coming soon anyway, why worry about alarmism from a bunch of silly old Nobel physicists?

Today’s update is that Hillary Clinton is offering $100 billion in U.S. aid if and only if the Chinese act responsibly and reduce their carbon emissions, i.e. immediately start to do what we ourselves have steadfastly refused to.

Copenhagen offers us in one neatly wrapped package the whole spectacle of mass species demise and the incapacity of knowledgeable souls among us to drown out the screeching bipeds swinging through the treetops.