The arrogance of politicians

Trying to keep track of what’s going on at the Copenhagen climate change talks is proving to be a very depressing experience.
To witness the self-serving, arrogant, obstructionist views of some politicians, particularly the ignorant morons in the American Republican party, is to witness some of the worst that humanity has to offer.
It’s hard to tell if it’s genuine ignorance or deliberate obfuscation but the lack of knowledge on display is staggering.
Observe the blatherings of Sarah Palin in the Washington Post, for example. A woman who seems to be so utterly divorced from reality it amazes me that she’s capable of dressing herself in the morning.

These “people” (and I use that term quite loosely) care nothing about the world, their only interests are appeasing the energy companies (amongst others) that fund their campaigns and avoiding doing anything that would upset their voters (who are frequently even more ignorant).
Heaven forbid that Mr. John Q. American should suffer at all (and thus vote for someone else) just because some poor bastard on a low lying island doesn’t want to watch his house disappear beneath the sea. Or because some parts of America get swamped by a constant barrage of hurricanes (but it’s okay, they’re poor areas so they don’t really count).
Their cowardice in attempting to shirk their responsibilities for helping to create this mess is appalling. Climate change is likely to hurt everyone. Suck it up. And rich countries like America and the UK can afford to pay what smaller, poorer countries cannot.
Where’s the downside to this? We help poorer countries be more efficient and develop faster, simultaneously reducing their CO2 emissions and increasing their prosperity. A country that is prosperous, with a strong infrastructure and a population that is not locked in poverty, is a country that is far less likely to breed the kind of dissatisfaction that allows extremist ideologies to flourish. Which is good for everyone, surely?
And then there’s investing in alternative energy solutions. Breaking our dependence on oil, increasing energy security, moving away from relying on what is unquestionably a limited resource, decreased pollution from power stations. These are all good things. People might lose their jobs, true, but new jobs will open up in new industries related to the use of renewable energy production.
There will be pain in the short term, there is no getting around that, but long term? It’s pure win, even if you’re a climate change denying moron like Palin.

Sadly, this notion that attempting to combat climate change is essentially a win-win scenario appears to escape the politicians, not just in America (though they are the most obvious example), but all around the world (Saudi Arabia, Russia and so on). They care only for themselves and their careers, and on the rare occasions when a politician looks beyond their own interests they rarely look beyond the narrow borders of the country they represent.
If their insular attitudes result in a failure to come up with a cohesive, global strategy to reduce the effects of climate change (and to mitigate the damage it will do to the poorer, more marginal countries of this world) then I don’t believe that future generations will forgive them or those of us who allowed them to get away with it, and nor should they.


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