Climate Control and Copenhagen

CLIMATE DEVELOPMENT AND COPENHAGEN
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, pepinsky.blogspot.com
December 11, 2009
Democracynow.org is the only U.S. media outlet to be broadcasting from Copenhagen during the U.N.-sponsored attempt to replace Kyoto with another climate treaty. Check out their free archive of daily broadcasts. Today’s feature was the global grassroots alternative to the UN conference: Klima (“climate” in Danish) Forum 2009. The series of reports from groups ended with the Ecuadoran president of the global group, “No Soil for Oil, No Hole for Coal.” Check out Democracy Now!’s reporting. Protestors this time want to block the pretense of international agreement on how to stop poisoning the planet for human consumption.
In my first essay on this blog last July, I argued that “growth” is inherently unsustainable. Growth remains the primary global force for human self-destruction. The imperative for growth is the human attitude that in practice most threatens the capacity of planet earth to support human life.
I’m thinking that the greatest contributor to laying waste on mother earth is transportation. How many thousands of miles does it take to produce the computer I am writing on, let along the fresh berries from Chile I eat for breakfast? How many people around me laid off have lost jobs dependent on it being cheaper for me to shop globally than locally? And in my country, the greater part of lost jobs is of people paid to sell imported goods.
I don’t know how to get from consuming globally toward consuming locally, but the movement represented in Copenhagen just now by Klima Forum 2009 and attendant protests convinces me that local commerce is the best antidote I can imagine to the global human footprint of global commerce. We cannot grow forever. Love and peace--hal