The climate conference in Bali

It started as a big balloon that was constantly being filled with hot air. Everyone seemed to agree that strong guidelines and goals had to be decided to be able to slow down the effects of climate change and possibly stop global temperatures from rising above the 2 degrees threshold and into a future of death and climate chaos. You could constantly hear that this was the only chance we had, and if we didn’t fully grab this opportunity we wouldn’t have a second chance.

Over 15000 people from all over the world attended the climate conference in Bali. Every respectable news media had someone reporting from the meetings. Environment organisations, trade unions and even fossil fuel companies where there to influence the end result.

So how did it all end? Well, at least they agreed on something. That’s better than nothing, right? But the agreement is far from enough. It’s not even close.

But who is to be blamed for the weak result? Mainly the climate criminal George W Bush (USA) and his buddies Australia, Canada and Japan. From the beginning these countries tried to wreck the conference, but in the end USA stood alone (like they always seem to do these days) and had to agree to go along.

In the beginning EU were tough against USA and their climate wrecking. EU threatened that they would boycott USA and their Major Emitters Meeting if they [uSA] didn’t agree on 25-40% emission reductions for industrialised countries. They almost made me proud of being a citizen in the European Union. But unfortunately the EU got soft in the end.

I guess we all can remember what kind of difference the Kyoto protocol have done and what the countries who signed it have done to follow it. Only a few countries, you can actually count those on one hand, have lowered their greenhouse gas emissions since 1990. And that is mostly because of the fact that the dirty industries have moved away, in true globalisation spirit, to low-cost, development countries like China or India. So the emissions haven’t really been lowered, they have just moved to new places.

So let’s hope that the new Bali “roadmap” won’t just be a symbolic paper that the politicians in the different countries can use as an excuse for doing too little or nothing at all.

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Read more about the climate conference in Bali.