CopenHANGOVER: the blame game begins

By | December 21, 2009, 6:56pm PST

Summary: The hangover from Copenhagen throbs from blame and disappoinment.

Nobody seems really happy after Copenhagen. Two weeks of haggling and a last minute “accord” means discord. And as we all suspected, nothing really was confirmed. Nations went home with a writing assignment. Due back to the U.N. next month. No penalty if the term paper is late, however.

The British Prime Minister said Copenhagen was “hugely disappointing.” One American critic called the whole process a “mosh pit.”

WHO CAN WE BLAME?
Blame is a very strong human impulse and it’s now being fully exercised in the aftershock, the aftermath, the mornings-after Copenhagen.

The Brazilian President blames the United States.

A left-wing British paper blames a smaller segment of America, the 100-member U.S. Senate.

One American writer who wanted to see big things out of C-hagen narrows it down to President Obama. Blame him, she writes.

China, of course, gets a share of the blame from some.

And the United Nations, host to the Denmark delirium, gets blamed for its idealistic, everybody’s got to agree, approach.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

I caught an NPR show that began with those fighting words, “Our lifestyle is killing the planet”

They went on to interview Pulitzer-prize-winner Thomas Friedman. We are not having a green revolution, he says. We’re having a green party, so much fun. What’s happening now has nothing to do with a revolution. Freidman says, it’s a revolution when somebody gets hurt, people actually have to change their behavior. IF we wanted to get enough clean electricity to get off dirty fuels, he says, we need one new 1 gigawatt nuc plant every day for next 36 years.

Friedman says we can only achieve that scale through innovation and conservation. We’re not, he says, going to regulate our way out of this one. We must shape the market with right price signals, need to make green energy cheaper and fossil fuels more expensive. We’ll need to see a green Google and green MSFT. If we pull off the defeat of global warming, it will be biggest industrial project of mankind. Optimists are usually wrong and pessimists right, but all the great changes in history done by opt. Friedman concludes: future is a choice not a fate. “We have exactly enough time, starting now.”

Europe’s regional attempt to make fossil fuels more expensive is looking anemic. In the face of Copenhagen’s non-progress on emission controls, the cap and trade market in Europe is in free fall. Nobody sees the need to buy those pollution permits that are supposed to make carbon emissions too expensive to endure.

DENIERS DENIED, AGAIN
Deniers must be bummed. Not one single nation was willing to stand up in public and say, “This is a hoax.” Can you imagine a conspiracy that includes all the countries? This could be the biggest fraud since sub-prime mortgages. Or, it could be as real as real estate itself. What would, say China or Vietnam, gain by going along with the gag, if this GW thing weren’t real?

Poll

The Copenhagen outcome shows

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Disclosure

Harry Fuller

http://blogs.zdnet.com/green/?page_id=2

Biography

Harry Fuller

Harry Fuller is a media veteran, having spent decades in TV news in the San Francisco Bay Area. As GeneralManager of KPIX-TV (CBS) he founded one of the nation's first TV station websites in early 1995. He was News Direcor at TechTV when it was founded in 1998. In 2001 he moved to London to become Executive Producer for CNBC Europe. Four years later he returned to San Francisco as Executive Editor for CNET's news.com.

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This is exactly the problem with these ecotards
Johnny Vegas 22nd Dec 2009
We need to develop a cheaper source of green energy but we do not need to make fossil energy more expensive. That's the stupidest thing we could do. The transition will happen pretty quickly by normal market forces if the new energy is much cheaper without being subsidized and there's no need to cause economic hardship durign the transition. In a matter of a couple decades probably 70-80% will be switched over and that's with fossil fuels also becoming much cheaper along the way to remain competitive. by the end of 3 decades there'll be probably less than 3% hold overs.

This is the problem with socialist movements. They are focused on punishment (regulation, rationing, fines) and wealth redistribution and not on progress. Therefore they latch on to whatever boneheaded idea they can that's anti status quo like wind/solar that's completely not ready for prime time and doesnt complete unsubsidized and push it. They don't understand that there is no such thing as a status quo in a true market, just a sensible waiting until the next thing is truly ready. There is no shortage of R&D or investment in green energy and when the tech is ready fossil fuels will be the next buggy whips. Government meddling hampers this much more than it helps. Transferring billions to people who are at worst brutal thug dictators and at best helpless and hapless at contributing to moving us forward to the new tech is sheer stupidity.
0 Votes
+ -
anyways until we reach the no return point
Quebec-french 21st Dec 2009
Idiot everywhere still claim this is a hoax ...
but the day that people will start dying because
if global warming .... Its gonna be a pleasure to
see the nay-sayer get mob-squash
0 Votes
+ -
It is a hoax
Lerianis10 22nd Dec 2009
And most of the people who are saying that it
is a hoax are like myself: liberals who have
IQ's of 150+ and have looked at the data and
the temperature records for our areas and have
realized that man is having NO effect on global
warming in the slightest.

Now, as to us making the polar ice caps melt?
The soot that we put into the air might be the
cause of that, seeing as how in some places the
snow and ice at the poles is tinged black.
0 Votes
+ -
Short sighted
Gizmo-n-Tasha 22nd Dec 2009
"and have looked at the data and
the temperature records for our areas"

If all you've looked at is the records for your area then you won't see the big picture. And the big picture is kind of depressing.
0 Votes
+ -
it is depressing
someitguy79 22nd Dec 2009
"If all you've looked at is the records for your area then you won't see the big picture. And the big picture is kind of depressing."

Yeah that beacon of freedom and private property rights is going to be destroyed for a hoax to enrich a few like Al Gore. Yeah it is depressing.
0 Votes
+ -
For an IQ of 150
ITLeader Updated - 22nd Dec 2009
You sure sound simplistic. Makes me doubt your claim. Did you poll all the "hoax" claimers? Sounds like you are just making stuff up as usual.

Did you ever come up a link for your "heat index" claim?
0 Votes
+ -
PRAISE for all those world leaders who had the guts to say Scr*w those lying scientists!

PRAISE for all those Deniers who are - well - simply right.

PRAISE to God for putting Europe and North America in a cold spell, as if to say 'NAH NAH NAH - BUNCH OF LOOOSAHS'!


Man-made global warming will one day be exposed for what it is, a lie. Generations after us will laught at those silly liberals, treehuggers, socialists and Fuller-likes who get all hysterical, soaking up IPCC propaganda.

Fun!

Nah, this was Great Conference! Fantastic Outcome!

HAHAHAHAHA
0 Votes
+ -
You got some left wingers getting excited. You got some white old men sitting around drinking Scotch. No body else cares.
But the bigger thing is that more and more people are
realizing that AGW (global warming exacerbated by humans)
is nothing more than bunk.

After ClimateGate, and the realization that the numbers
have been jacked with for many years, as have the models
done off those numbers..... it's not surprising that more
and more people are saying "WAIT A MINUTE!.... Let's get
some RELIABLE numbers from people who don't have a stake,
either way, in AGW before we go off half-cocked!"
0 Votes
+ -
We need to develop a cheaper source of green energy but we do not need to make fossil energy more expensive. That's the stupidest thing we could do. The transition will happen pretty quickly by normal market forces if the new energy is much cheaper without being subsidized and there's no need to cause economic hardship durign the transition. In a matter of a couple decades probably 70-80% will be switched over and that's with fossil fuels also becoming much cheaper along the way to remain competitive. by the end of 3 decades there'll be probably less than 3% hold overs.

This is the problem with socialist movements. They are focused on punishment (regulation, rationing, fines) and wealth redistribution and not on progress. Therefore they latch on to whatever boneheaded idea they can that's anti status quo like wind/solar that's completely not ready for prime time and doesnt complete unsubsidized and push it. They don't understand that there is no such thing as a status quo in a true market, just a sensible waiting until the next thing is truly ready. There is no shortage of R&D or investment in green energy and when the tech is ready fossil fuels will be the next buggy whips. Government meddling hampers this much more than it helps. Transferring billions to people who are at worst brutal thug dictators and at best helpless and hapless at contributing to moving us forward to the new tech is sheer stupidity.

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