Profits before planet

The planet is being held hostage by vested interests, today we are being led by the oil and gas companies, the gun lobby, the hunters, the loggers, the trappers, the polluters and the beef, pork, poultry and fishing industries. If hurricanes, floods, droughts and food shortages cannot stop our ways and attitudes about climate change, how then can diplomats do better in Bali?

In the US media, the Bali conference was invisible, it came and went. In end we have a map without a destination, a very useful tool if we are planning to go nowhere.

George Monbiot points out a source of corruption in all this - political campaign finance. He writes in the the Guardian “…since 1990, the energy and natural resources sector - mostly coal, oil, gas, logging and agribusiness - has given $418m to federal politicians in the US. Transport companies have given $355m. The big polluters favour the Republicans, but most of them also fund Democrats. During the 2000 presidential campaign, oil and gas companies lavished money on Bush, but they also gave Gore $142,000, while transport companies gave him $347,000. The whole US political system is in hock to people who put their profits ahead of the biosphere.”

I think it is important to point out, when reading the above, that corporations are not democracies, they are led by shareholders who are bound by the great oath of capitalism, profit. Those who have the most share of the cake decide. Today the same pattern is seen within the international community, the same corporations leading the US indirectly are also shaping its policies world-wide.

How can we break free from this grip? How can we find a way out? The answer will have to come down to a popular movement - young people especially should not tolerate such lame leadership as we have seen in Bali. They are the ones inheriting this mess. We need a new world built from basic ecological principles. Economics is a subsidiary to ecology. Real wealth such as clean water, food, medicines and resources come from nature, they are not conjured out of nothing. The capacity for the earth to sustain life is crumbling under mindless exploitation, resource extraction, chemical farming and the burning of fossil fuels. We might have to come face to face with a world not being able to feed us or provide any of the basic services such as clean water and fertile soils.

I have a dream:

Together we say: no more carbon dioxide emissions.
Together we declare the end of the age of oil, and the beginning of renewable energy.
We form a pact to restore the earth and we install the boldest initiative since the Marshall Plan.

all the best for 2008!