(“Your other right.” – promoted by ek hornbeck)
or, as Alexander Downer himself calls it, a political stunt.
All Hail Market Based Policy!
All Hail the Status Quo!
All Hail the Sydney Declaration on Climate Change!
Bush, far right in the photograph, seems so exhausted by his trip to OPEC or Austria or wherever the hell it was that he can’t even lift up his paw in time with the rest. You can almost hear the photographer: your other right, Mr. President.
Let’s make sure we’ve got our priorities straight right off the bat:
| The pursuit of climate change and energy security policies must avoid introducing barriers to trade and investment. |
Economic growth, a recurring subject in the text, is mentioned before climate change in the very first sentence. Sounds like a good plan: endless economic expansion, with no piper to pay.
At least it’s proactive:
| We are committed to the global objective of stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system. |
Get out much? That ship left port quite some time ago. Never mind, on to the money shot, of which they seem so proud:
| We agree to work to achieve a common understanding on a long-term aspirational global emissions reduction goal to pave the way for an effective post-2012 international arrangement. |
Anyone care to parse this? Verb, infinitive, infinitive, kumbayaa, mush, more mush, obligatory lie. They don’t want any binding targets, we get that. No targets at all, in fact. How about a goal? Well, okay, as long at it’s just an aspirational goal.
What’s an aspirational goal? Howard’s foreign minister, Alexander Downer, defined it for us in his lecture on APEC at Monash University on April 19th of this year:
Secondly, I think you have to face up to the fact that, within the APEC group, there are economies, and it’s really a Kyoto point again, that believe in setting CO2 emission targets, by particular dates. Some of them, of course, are just aspirational targets, which is code for “a political stunt”.
Posit that you are 40 pounds overweight. If your answer to the question How much weight do you want to lose? is along the lines of I agree to work to achieve an understanding on a long-term aspirational goal to pave the way for an effective reduction of my fat intensity at some undetermined time in the future . . . . I would submit that you are not serious. Enjoy your cheeseburger, and don’t even bring up the subject of weight loss.
Combine the yammering about reducing the intensity of emissions or the intensity of energy consumption with the insistence that everybody has to commit to sacrifice before we can agree to do anything at all, and what do you have? Here’s a clue: the citizens of Bangladesh already walk to work, and the citizens of Namibia consume per capita one tenth the electricity that Americans do. How much more do you expect them to rein in their extravagance?
Most striking is the Action Agenda portion of this document. All right! Action:
| . . . . working towards achieving an APEC-wide regional aspirational goal of a reduction in energy intensity of at least 25 per cent by 2030 |
How much more of this kind of action can we stand?
From Sydney, a bon voyage to Bush as he flits back to get rested up for another series of photo ops on September 11th. And a 21-Bum salute:
Also posted at Truth & Progress
27 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
have I mentioned how much I hate these people?
great diary, melvin.
I especially like and agree with:
“If your answer to the question How much weight do you want to lose? is along the lines of I agree to work to achieve an understanding on a long-term aspirational goal to pave the way for an effective reduction of my fat intensity at some undetermined time in the future . . . . I would submit that you are not serious. Enjoy your cheeseburger, and don’t even bring up the subject of weight loss.”
Nice Yellow, really pops out at you.
…I agree with you that slaving environmental policy to economic expansion is at the least, rather unwise.
On the other hand, I’ll also point out that economic expansion is a key part to making environmentalism possible at all.
Two things are, as much as I can tell, absolute. The first is that the worldwide demand for energy will continue to rise, no matter what we do. World population is predicted to continue to increase for the next 43 years; merely feeding those people will require increased use of energy to some degree. The second is that environmentally sound energy production is, at present, more expensive, at least in start-up costs.
So, not only will we need expanding energy production, but we will need economic profits to enable us to make that expanding production as environmentally sound as we can make it. Indeed, if we do (as I think we should) subsidize as much as possible environmentally sound energy production (since it seems clear to me that the savings in start-up costs for unsound energy production are easily outstripped by long-term costs), we will need to maximize that economic expansion for the near term.
As I’ve told you dozens of times, I’m not a big expert on environmental issues or politics. But I am pretty up on my economics. And I think that key to the success of environmental politics is going to be a partnership with economics and trade, and the understanding that we will need to make these policies work in a manner that is successful on both counts.
Just sayin’.
I believe they’re saying, “Since we can’t agree on anything, but we know that we have to discuss this again in a few years, we’ll at least agree that we will indeed discuss this again in a few years.”