{"id":15633,"date":"2015-12-24T09:09:50","date_gmt":"2015-12-24T14:09:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15633"},"modified":"2015-12-24T09:09:50","modified_gmt":"2015-12-24T14:09:50","slug":"too-little-too-late","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=15633","title":{"rendered":"Too Little, Too Late"},"content":{"rendered":"

Too Little, Too Late<\/a><\/h3>\n

Last week, after a great deal of debate, the passengers aboard the\u00a0Titanic<\/em>\u00a0voted to impose modest limits sometime soon on the rate at which water is pouring into the doomed ship\u2019s hull. Despite the torrents of self-congratulatory rhetoric currently flooding into the media from the White House and an assortment of groups on the domesticated end of the environmental movement, that\u2019s the sum of what happened at the COP-21 conference in Paris. It\u2019s a spectacle worth observing, and not only for those of us who are connoisseurs of irony; the factors that drove COP-21 to the latest round of nonsolutions are among the most potent forces shoving industrial civilization on its one-way trip to history\u2019s compost bin.<\/p>\n

The core issues up for debate at the Paris meeting were the same that have been rehashed endlessly at previous climate conferences. The consequences of continuing to treat the atmosphere as a gaseous sewer for humanity\u2019s pollutants are becoming increasingly hard to ignore, but nearly everything that defines a modern industrial economy as \u201cmodern\u201d and \u201cindustrial\u201d produces greenhouse gases, and the continued growth of the world\u2019s modern industrial economies remains the keystone of economic policy around the world. The goal pursued by negotiators at this and previous climate conferences, then, is to find some way to do something about anthropogenic global warming that won\u2019t place any kind of restrictions on economic growth.<\/p>\n

What that means in practice is that the world\u2019s nations have more or less committed themselves to limit the rate at which the dumping of greenhouse gases will increase over the next fifteen years. I\u2019d encourage those of my readers who think anything important was accomplished at the Paris conference to read that sentence again, and think about what it implies.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Too Little, Too Late Last week, after a great deal of debate, the passengers aboard the\u00a0Titanic\u00a0voted to impose modest limits sometime soon on the rate at which water is pouring into the doomed ship\u2019s hull. Despite the torrents of self-congratulatory rhetoric currently flooding into the media from the White House and an assortment of groups […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[2648,3463,4556,113,141,10451,242,386,423,1758,9056],"class_list":["post-15633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-anthropogenic-climate-change","tag-archdruid-report","tag-atmosphere","tag-carbon-emissions","tag-climate-change","tag-cop21","tag-economic-policy","tag-greenhouse-gases","tag-industrial-civilization","tag-john-michael-greer","tag-paris-climate-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15633"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15634,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15633\/revisions\/15634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}