2 Voices of Hope
Three voices of hope:
1. Gaia Vince, "One last chance to save mankind" (interview with James Lovelock) 23 January 2009 - New Scientist
Question by Vince: Do we have time…to save ourselves from climate change?
Answer by Lovelock: Not a hope in hell. Most of the "green" stuff is verging on a gigantic scam. Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It's not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it'll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning.
I don't think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what's coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing's been done except endless talk and meetings.
2. R. K. Pachauri, 2007 Nobel Prize winner and chief of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said the following in an interview in Science News, January 3, 2009 (p. 32): "We have only about seven years to turn around global emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. By 2015 they'll have to peak. By 2020 we'll need to put in place a 25 to 40% reduction in greenhouse gas omissions."
He also said, "The president (Obama) should lay down a target that within seven years the US will reduce oil imports by 50 percent. And that doesn't mean go out and drill in Alaska or everywhere else."
He insisted that the technologies for doing all of this exist now, although more research and development is necessary.
However, he said, "The financial meltdown is a major distraction. And it's serious all over the world." "But this financial crisis is not going to take away the reality of climate change."
3. Thomas Friedman, the renowned author of The World is Flat and other paeans of praise to global capitalism seems to have finally discovered the error in his faith:
"If it is not apparent to you yet, it will be soon: there is no magic bullet for this economic crisis, no magic bailout package, no magic stimulus. We have woven such a tangled financial mess with subprime mortgages wrapped in complex bonds and derivatives, pumped up with leverage, and then globalized to the far corners of the earth that, much as we want to think this will soon be over, that is highly unlikely.
"We are going to have to learn to live with a lot more uncertainty for a lot longer than our generation has ever experienced. We keep pouring money into the dark banking hole of this crisis, desperately hoping that we will hear it hit bottom and start to pile up. But so far, as hard as we listen, we can't hear a thing. And so we keep pouring ...
From "Elvis Has Left the Mountain"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/01/opinion/01friedman.html?th&emc=th
