A task of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, now under way in Durban, South Africa, is to extend earlier policy decisions that were limited in scope and only partially implemented.<\/p>\n
These decisions trace back to the U.N. Convention of 1992 and the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which the U.S. refused to join. The Kyoto Protocol\u2019s first commitment period ends in 2012. A fairly general pre-conference mood was captured by a New York Times headline: \u201cUrgent Issues but Low Expectations.\u201d<\/p>\n
As the delegates meet in Durban, a report on newly updated digests of polls by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Program on International Policy Attitudes reveals that \u201cpublics around the world and in the United States say their government should give global warming a higher priority and strongly support multilateral action to address it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Most U.S. citizens agree, though PIPA clarifies that the percentage \u201chas been declining over the last few years, so that American concern is significantly lower than the global average \u2013 70 percent as compared to 84 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAmericans do not perceive that there is a scientific consensus on the need for urgent action on climate change \u00e2(euro) [ A large majority think that they will be personally affected by climate change eventually, but only a minority thinks that they are being affected now, contrary to views in most other countries. Americans tend to underestimate the level of concern among other Americans.\u201d<\/p>\n
These attitudes aren\u2019t accidental. In 2009 the energy industries, backed by business lobbies, launched major campaigns that cast doubt on the near-unanimous consensus of scientists on the severity of the threat of human-induced global warming.<\/p>\n
The consensus is only \u201cnear-unanimous\u201d because it doesn\u2019t include the many experts who feel that climate-change warnings don\u2019t go far enough, and the marginal group that deny the threat\u2019s validity altogether.<\/p>\n
The standard \u201che says\/she says\u201d coverage of the issue keeps to what is called \u201cbalance\u201d: the overwhelming majority of scientists on one side, the denialists on the other. The scientists who issue the more dire warnings are largely ignored.<\/p>\n
One effect is that scarcely one-third of the U.S. population believes that there is a scientific consensus on the threat of global warming \u2013 far less than the global average, and radically inconsistent with the facts.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s no secret that the U.S. government is lagging on climate issues. \u201cPublics around the world in recent years have largely disapproved of how the United States is handling the problem of climate change,\u201d according to PIPA. \u201cIn general, the United States has been most widely seen as the country having the most negative effect on the world\u2019s environment, followed by China. Germany has received the best ratings.\u201d<\/p>\n
To gain perspective on what\u2019s happening in the world, it\u2019s sometimes useful to adopt the stance of intelligent extraterrestrial observers viewing the strange doings on Earth. They would be watching in wonder as the richest and most powerful country in world history now leads the lemmings cheerfully off the cliff.<\/p>\n
Last month, the International Energy Agency, which\u00a0was formed on the initiative of U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1974, issued its latest report on rapidly increasing carbon emissions from fossil fuel use.<\/p>\n
The IEA estimated that if the world continues on its present course, the \u201ccarbon budget\u201d will be exhausted by 2017. The budget is the quantity of emissions that can keep global warming at the 2 degrees Celsius level considered the limit of safety.<\/p>\n
IEA chief economist Fatih Birol said, \u201cThe door is closing \u00e2(euro) [ if we don\u2019t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum (for safety). The door will be closed forever.\u201d<\/p>\n
Also last month, the U.S. Department of Energy reported the emissions figures for 2010. Emissions \u201cjumped by the biggest amount on record,\u201d The Associated Press reported, meaning that \u201clevels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst-case scenario\u201d anticipated by the International Panel on Climate Change in 2007.<\/p>\n
John Reilly, co-director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology\u2019s program on climate change, told the AP that scientists have generally found the IPCC predictions to be too conservative \u2013 unlike the fringe of denialists who gain public attention. Reilly reported that the IPCC\u2019s worst-case scenario was about in the middle of the MIT scientists\u2019 estimates of likely outcomes.<\/p>\n
As these ominous reports were released, the Financial Times devoted a full page to the optimistic expectations that the U.S. might become energy-independent for a century with new technology for extracting North American fossil fuels.<\/p>\n
Though projections are uncertain, the Financial Times reports, the U.S. might \u201cleapfrog Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world\u2019s largest producer of liquid hydrocarbons, counting both crude oil and lighter natural gas liquids.\u201d<\/p>\n
In this happy event, the U.S. could expect to retain its global hegemony. Beyond some remarks about local ecological impact, the Financial Times said nothing about what kind of a world would emerge from these exciting prospects. Energy is to burn; the global environment be damned.<\/p>\n
Just about every government is taking at least halting steps to do something about the likely impending catastrophe. The U.S. is leading the way \u2013 backward. The Republican-dominated U.S. House of Representatives is now dismantling environmental measures introduced by Richard Nixon, in many respects the last liberal president.<\/p>\n
This reactionary behavior is one of many indications of the crisis of U.S. democracy in the past generation. The gap between public opinion and public policy has grown to a chasm on central issues of current policy debate such as the deficit and jobs. However, thanks to the propaganda offensive, the gap is less than what it should be on the most serious issue on the international agenda today \u2013 arguably in history.<\/p>\n
The hypothetical extraterrestrial observers can be pardoned if they conclude that we seem to be infected by some kind of lethal insanity.<\/p>\n
___________________________<\/p>\n
Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics (Emeritus) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the author of dozens of books on U.S. foreign policy. He writes a monthly column for The New York Times News Service\/Syndicate.<\/em><\/p>\n \u00a9 2011 Noam Chomsky. <\/em><\/p>\n Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To gain perspective on what\u2019s happening in the world, it\u2019s sometimes useful to adopt the stance of intelligent extraterrestrial observers viewing the strange doings on Earth. They would be watching in wonder as the richest and most powerful country in world history now leads the lemmings cheerfully off the cliff.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}