The Warsaw conference on climate change concluded on 23 November 2013 with very poor results. The baggage that politicians take back home is quite empty, if compared with the expectations of a serious consideration of the alarming Fifth Report of IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change). Time is out, climate change are already the present and not only our future, as the increasing extreme meteorological events demonstrate. We have a really short time to avoid future dramatic scenarios; the World Bank is supporting with its recent reports the necessity to start now a revolution in economic and technological systems, as the best way to tackle both climate and economic crisis. The current financial crisis may turn out to be a golden opportunity to move toward a low carbon economy and investments in new technologies low carbon could be a strong opportunity to solve the economic crisis.
On this grounds we are really astonished of the poor results coming from Warsaw, while UNFCC (UN Framework on Climate Change) declare a “success” just because they decided important formality on protection of forests. This demonstrate once more that the current politic system is not suitable with sustainability; they will not take decisions that imply today a cost for a supposed benefit that will occur several decades on. The most they can do is to wait the things happen and then try to solve the problems. We have a political system unable to think to the future, concentrated only to maintain the best possible situation in the present. They are only able to postpone the needed decisions. So they act as the captain very busy to teach the sailors on how to clean the deck and make it brilliant, while the sea around him is storming.
This time, discussion stalled on a basic principle of justice, that has the only problem to be not yet ruled by the international law: the economic support to adaptation in the developing countries. Out of the technicality that characterises these negotiations, that make it obscure to the “external world” and substantially ignored by common people, we can represent the situation as a group of colleagues joined for a dinner; those rich eat stuffing themselves certain to be able to pay the bill, while those poor eat only the starter aware to be not able to pay too much. But at the end the richest pretend to divide the bill in equal parts with the poorest. This is exactly what happened in the last century economy: the rich countries benefitted of using more and more fossil fuels to feed an unlimited growth of consumptions, causing the global climate change that nowadays affect the whole world and not only their own countries. Through this economic pattern they reached a level of economic and technologic power very much higher than the rest of the world and can face climate change without much problems; they think so. On the other hand poor countries, that are the same affected by climate changes without having caused them and without have enjoyed any benefit, don’t have enough resources for adaptation and will suffer the hardest consequences. Countries like Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, now when they are beginning to enter into the “club of rich countries” do not want accept limits imposed by those who have abundantly thrived until now.
It is surprising that environmentalists still hope that these sort of negotiation will produce some agreement useful and in time to save the planet. The only useful way to pursue is support the growth of a people movement made by all those that feel threatened by climate change, to urge politicians to put this problem at the top of their agenda abandoning the myth of an unlimited growth of consumption. Only this people, as they are concerned of the future of their sons and nephews, if well informed, can choose coherent life styles and ask politicians a serious assumption of responsibility.
This is the disconcerting situation we have to face and against what everybody has close to his heart the future of humanity must rise up.