No guarantee Montreal ozone talks will succeed: U.S.

[jpak]

http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSN1723758520070917

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Although countries back the idea of eliminating ozone-depleting chemicals faster than originally planned, there is no guarantee that they will agree on a new accelerated timetable at a major conference this week, a senior U.S. official said on Monday.

Claudia McMurray, U.S. assistant secretary for the environment, said the main problem was working out whether the technical and financial aid available for the developing world would be enough to satisfy countries such as China.

Delegates from almost 200 countries opened a week of talks in Montreal on Monday, 20 years after they signed a pact in the Canadian city to cut chemicals found to harm the ozone layer, which protects the Earth from ultraviolet radiation.

The United States -- backed by the United Nations -- wants to move the deadline for phasing out production and use of the substances for developed countries to 2020 from 2030 and to 2030 from 2040 for developing nations.

<more>

edit: what utter fucking fools...

[GliderGuider]

1. Utter ffracking fools indeed.

People don't generally appreciate how narrowly we dodged the ozone bullet. One guy tending an ancient Dobson meter in the Antarctic raised the alarm. When asked if their satellites had seen anything similar to Dr. Farman's rapid ozone depletion blips, the Americans said no. When Farman verified his observations with a second Dobson meter a couple of years later the Yanks finally went back and looked at their raw satellite data. There it was, clear as day. They hadn't seen it because they only looked at the computer-processed data, and the computer threw out any data that looked like an outlier! If Farman's meter had been decommissioned as planned (he had to fight hard for the funding to keep it going) we'd have never known about it until our faces started to peel off.

And now those assholes want to push back the deadline? They really do want us all to die - it's the only explanation that makes any sense.

[Nihil]

2. Ummm ... ?

I read the OP that they are wanting to pull forward the deadline ...

>> The United States -- backed by the United Nations -- wants to move the
>> deadline for phasing out production and use of the substances for
>> developed countries to 2020 from 2030 and to 2030 from 2040 for
>> developing nations.

I know that this is totally unexpected for the US administration but, unless
it was a typo in the OP, it looks like the US and UN are actually trying
to do the right thing here.

:shrug:

Or maybe I've got my head on upside down today?

[GliderGuider]

3. Oops! You're right!

I got caught by my expectation that the current US administration always does the exact wrong thing, and my brain glitched on that sentence too. Thanks for catching that. Congratulations to them for wanting to accelerate the deadline!

:applause:

[leebert]

5. George Bush has done more to fight global warming than any other president too !

Or maybe he hasn't.... ;-)

But he *did* start the diesel soot cleanup that Clinton resisted.

I suppose around here that's considered ironic.

;-)

Seriously tho, aren't y'all just a bit prone to bashing the world b/c it doesn't fit an ideal?

[GliderGuider]

7. Re bashing the world for not fitting an ideal

Somebody has to hold the idiots' feet to the fire. What better place to do it than here? Who better than us?

“Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?” - Robert Browning (No, not the guy that invented that 9mm pistol!)

[leebert]

9. We try to grasp the sky ..

.. but for our minds, we cannot have it.

So GG, what's with the mandala? Are you one of those zafu-flattening types?

(FWIW, I am.... ;-)

[GliderGuider]

12. The mandala

is more of a pagan free-love thing.

I'm not even really a pagan. I thought I had become a pantheist several months ago, but I eventually realized I had just become a Deep Ecologist before I discovered it had a name.

[leebert]

13. Meditation ...

Zafus are used in Buddhist meditation (yogic & tantric work as well)...

Have you heard of Joanna Macy, a big deep ecologist writer, speaker? She points out (correctly, IMO) that lots of activists are being pulled backwards by despair and anger, ennui, apognosis, fatalism. She things that denial of these emotions led to apathy and disempowerment. Problem is that you can borrow some from Buddhism but if you adopt only part of Buddhism then you just end up reifying forms again, kinda like chasing whack-a-moles.

Interconnectedness becomes dualistic very easily if the *other* guy doesn't get the insight. With the atavistic "other" to worry about, the dialectic is reified, everyone's neatly pushed back into their respective corners, no progress is made. Dick Cheney grows horns, Bush the baby killer .. so long as there's a bogey man in the battle to galvanize the faithful then both sides can be comfortable in their respective towers.

So much for the dharmic path finding interconnectedness with Dick Cheney, eh?

Buddhism <> paganism (well, unless you're a bible thumper, then just about everyone else is a pagan...). What most Westerners don't realize is that Buddhism is far more PoMo than anything the critical theorists have ... Gotama keyed onto the universal, hide&go-seek nature of delusion 2500 years ago and still most people just don't get it.

What Ghandi demonstrated most of all was compassionate criticism .. being able to negotiate, in good faith, WITH the powerful.

[GliderGuider]

14. Well, I come from a stock of hard-core Western atheist intellectuals

So my knowledge of Buddhism is mostly leftover hippy Zen from my ditchweed days. All I really know is that if we don't figure out right smartly that everything is connected we'll never be able to put together a satisfying short- or long-term existence on this planet.

I've also been thinking about fatalism since you mentioned it yesterday. I'm often accused of it, and I'm trying to figure out what the word means in relation to how I perceive and respond to the world. One needs to be very careful not to confuse a simple acceptance of limits with fatalism. IMO the acceptance is a recognition, while fatalism describes one possible response.

For example, I recognize that all energy sources likely to be available to humanity in the future will exhibit declining EROEI, and that this sounds a death knell for many of the civilizing structures we have created. Some people regard my disinclination to fight with Mother Nature over that issue as fatalistic. I don't see it that way, though. If I were to choose to simply do nothing whatever in the face of that recognition that would be a fatalistic response. The equation has two terms, however, "energy" and "civilization". I choose to accept the "energy" term as given, but respond actively on the "civilization" side of the equation.

It works like this. If we won't have enough energy to preserve our current civilization we can either try to increase the energy available or change our expectations of civilization. Accepting that there are limits on energy doesn't shut us out of the solution space, it just means that we are constrained to the possible - changing the path of civilization. That's the approach I've adopted, so I reject the charge of fatalism out of hand.

[leebert]

15. parameters

Sorry, but the "limits" alibi doesn't exculpate... sure there're reasons to think that we might finally "crash & burn" but what are the counterveiling abilities of humanity? Are they sufficient to meet the challenges?

You've mentioned one possibility already: Living with less. Efficiency gains are another aspect. Altho I'd rather we not use nuclear power the world would resort to it if necessary. Storage batteries for wind power generation are being piloted... all this stuff is coming down the pike.

There're various technologies already in R&D that are very readily deployed like infrared photovoltaic solar paint:

http://www.bookofjoe.com/2007/06/solar-paint.html

Imagine absorbing up to a 1/3rd of ambient multiband infrared radiation (heat) via wavelength-sensitive layers. Apparently this stuff can be made fairly cheaply. I don't know if we'll be facing another asbestos problem with all this nanotech stuff, but here comes the future...

There are many ways to look at a problem. Dropping forms (expectations and conclusions) helps to look at the world anew. The depth of your thinking is beyond the avg. pabla in these fora ...

Even though I'm willing to be pragmatic (not sanguine) about the interim use of coal, twenty years down the road our energy use map may very well look totally different.

I honestly see no functional reason why everything needs to come to a grinding halt ... heh ...
"If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower..." -- Talking Heads

[GliderGuider]

17. Efficiency

My readings on resilience theory and complex adaptive systems makes me very suspicious of efficiency-enhancing suggestions. The problem is that efficiency and resilience have an inverse relationship, so that increases in efficiency tend to reduce system resilience. Given that our civilization is already showing major signals of brittleness I am reluctant to endorse measures that might further exacerbate that aspect of the problem.

There are too many of us doing too much - techno-fixes will not address that fundamental problem. IMO global resource consumption and waste generation is too high for sustainability by a factor of at least 5. The solutions being proposed don't come anywhere near being able to close that gap. I don't believe that we will be able to accomplish the required changes before the consequences are upon us, because if you look around you will notice that the consequences are already upon us. There is pitifully little recognition of that fact; of those that do recognize it pitifully few have accepted that the way we live must undergo some immediate, fundamental changes; of those that have accepted that necessity pitifully few have any access to the levers of public policy; of those that have such access pitifully few are getting anything accomplished. Frankly, it's pitiful.

We will get what we will get. I'm convinced there will be a massive, unavoidable die-off, so my mission is to wake up as many people as possible to that conclusion so they can help plan actions that will ensure that the next cycle will have a better chance than we did. That means things like encouraging the local antibody-style environmental/social justice groups that are springing up around the planet, encouraging people to adopt matrifocal value systems, encouraging the formation of isolated, sustainable lifeboat communities, and supporting knowledge retention projects around the world. It does not include throwing more technology at the problem.

Our energy use map will look different twenty years down the road, but what won't look different is the level of global resource consumption and waste production. Twenty years is too short a time for 6.6 billion people to voluntarily change their ways enough to offset the rise in population that will occur in that time.

Preserving business as usual, even (especially) with cool gadgets and efficiencies will only make matters worse in the long run.

[leebert]

16. Zen, not Zen

Well, I come from a stock of hard-core Western atheist intellectuals so my knowledge of Buddhism is mostly leftover hippy Zen from my ditchweed days.

Atheist or anti-theist? :-)

Well, a lot of what goes around passing itself off as Buddhism or Zen ... well, tends to miss the point. I've met lots of people who walked away from some personality-driven meditation group wondering ... "WTF? Groovy nonsense!"

Buddhism is one of those big tent conglomerations with lots of semi-theistic gobbledygook tacked on it, but the core canon of Buddhism is actually nontheistic. The beauty of Buddhism is that it's experiential and pragmatic, no faith required, just give it a try. Even Gotama said that nibbana is optional and belief in reincarnation isn't required. It's helped me take a good look at my own propensities toward nihilism and let go of some worst-case conclusions.

Form is emptiness, emptiness form.

[leebert]

4. The USA does the right thing! Better we are, than the rest! Woohoo!

Read the sentence, son... the USA is *advancing* the phase-out BY TEN YEARS.

The reason why the developing countries are dragging their heals is that they *LOVE* the old refrigerants b/c they can use them to scam Kyoto. Notice how the developing countries are grumbling 'cuz the want to get paid. Here's why:

"Kyoto Projects Harming Ozone Layer -- U.N. Official"
see: http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL137011320070813
Kyoto's carbon-credit system subverted via cheating, counter-productive to Montreal Protocol's goal to preserve ozone layer.

You think ol' Dick Cheney's a duplicitous stinker? Try most of the commie party in China.

[GliderGuider]

6. I think a bunch of us, including the OP, just misread the article.

They may be scamming Kyoto, everyone else is. Or they may just be concerned about the cost of replacing existing CFCs with new refrigerants. Or both.

"commie party"? Where'd that come from?

[leebert]

8. Chinese Commie Party?

Isn't the Chinese leadership communist?

They're the ones who are protecting these Kyoto scams that are damaging the ozone layer. Why change when they can double their salable CO2 credits by manufacturing ozone-destroying chemicals?

If Dick Cheney's an oily scheming stinker, then why give the Kyoto scammers the benefit of the doubt either?

Or are our avante-liberal bonafides too precious for us to be frank about how FUBAR the rest of the world's politics are?

On average, we've got it pretty good in the USA. Could it be better? Sure. But proportionalism should be part of the liberal intellectual arsenal.

Or is the sky always falling down?

Oh, wait, it is. By definition. Gravity makes it so.

[GliderGuider]

11. The Chinese leadership is between a rock and a hard place.

They've promised their people that they would have their day in the industrial sun. They are far enough down that path now that turning back would dash the expectations of their citizens, and 1.3 billion angry, disappointed citizens are a revolutionary force to be reckoned with. The problem is, the leadership has seen and understood that they came too late to the party. The world's high-quality energy resource base (sweet oil, natural gas and high quality coal) is pretty much tapped out, and they are left with only lower-quality, expensive, unattractive options like heavy oil, brown coal and nuclear power. Of course they are using every loophole at their disposal to try and cope with this impossible situation.

As you point out, it's not much different than what the current US administration (and the Russians and the Europeans, for that matter) are doing, and it all stems from the same root cause - an imminent decline in the master resource of industrial civilization. They are all responding similarly, because the economic rules are the same for everyone: grow or die. Anything that gets in the way of that must be either overcome or circumvented, at pretty much any cost.

The political differences among them really don't matter much in the face of this overarching imperative, but I claim that there really aren't that many fundamental differences between the world's political philosophies anyway. They all encode hierarchical power accumulation and distribution, and their structures are developed to facilitate those processes. The democratic/tyrannical/capitalist/communist/social-democrat decorations they present as their defining differences are, in the final analysis, little more than window dressing over their underlying similarities of hierarchy, competition and the accumulation of power.

[jpak]

10. No - my comment was about the resistance to the accelerated time table

and ChimpCo's feigned "pessimism" about the chances for success...

Note: ChimpCo has been dragging its feet regarding bromine production/use...

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0720-02.htm

http://www.panna.org/resources/panups/panup_20051214.dv.html

http://www.newstarget.com/021008.html

...and they could care less about HCFCs as long as China looks like the Bad Guy here...

(sorry for the confusion)