Copenhagen 12-7-09? Why Care?

Above: Actor and marshal arts expert Jet Li speaking on climate change for Cop15.

Here are some excellent questions which, if you’ve come to read this, will strike you as the sort which could be answered:

Is our species’ environmental clock really at 11:01 P.M.? With perfect prose and profound metaphor I would like to assure you it is, but half-a-century of experience and intuition about how humanity lives can’t help me put that into a sound-bite or paragraph. But, with patient, long-suffering experts like Tom Lovejoy telling us that we can expect that 1/4 to 1/3 of all species on Earth will perish unless we quickly pull our act together – now – that should get your attention and make you step into action. Tom also agreed that there’s no computer or scientist’s consortium – no modeling process – to accurately estimate the outcome of our species’ environmental influence.

Above: Desmond Tutu speaking on climate change for Cop15.

So if one assumes for the moment that we’re really in the middle of a big problem, what would be the next big step we could take to solve it? Would a multi-national conference with our best leaders be a good place to get rolling? Then the process of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change would be that place, known lately in the media as Copenhagen, Cop-15 and other slang.

Above: Denmark’s Prime Minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, speaks about climate change for Cop15 and mentions the YouTube setup to send your video directly into the meeting’s conference rooms.

If the things above are what’s happening, and they are, then what has the United States done about its part in the Cop15 process? Who are the players? What’s the agenda? The meeting of our elected and appointed officials starts on December 7, 2009 in Denmark. If you look around the Web or listen to the old broadcast media you won’t find anything of substance about what’s being done. Do you want anything positive to come of this?

Why would the process, goals and names of our U.S. delegation to the Copenhagen meeting – from one of the world’s model democracies, with one of the world’s most respected leaders be so hard to find? Does the president of one of the most powerful and influential nations in the world, responsible with China for most of global warming, have a video that says exactly what he’s going to do to solve these problems?

These are questions we’ll try and resolve on the next Blue Planet Almanac, 11-23-09