Politicians meet global warming at last, or again?

Well, good news for groenlinks, one might say. De Stern report get the attention of bloggers (not only from this planeet) elsewhere. Even my Venezuelan friends are hot on the issue, even if their incomes depend on selling the black gold (or devil's shit, as oil was known around hundred years ago). Even Blair is paying Gore to spin more attention to the dangers of global warming. Groenlinks might claim, again, to be in the avant garde of the political thinking for the future.

Now, one wonders. It is a bit surprising that so many people seems so excited about this report. Similar research is known since long time ago. Take, among many others, a paper published in Nature back in 2001. (De Leo et al, 413: 478-479) Then the authors already researched on the winnings of honouring the commitments of Kyoto. Maybe it was too much of a positive view. Back then everybody carped on the costs of Kyoto, and De Leo and colleagues, researchers associated to the university of Rome, showed that complying with Kyoto will be (or actually would have been) far cheaper than not complying with it. But hey, other issues came in the global agenda. Inflamed oil crashed on the twin towers, so we got more concerned with terrorists than with the means that gave them so much money in the first place.

Ok, five years later we might be back on track. The impact of Gore antics are not to be easily dismissed, at least up to the moment that he decides about his presidential aspirations in 2008. Blair might be on his way out of number 10, but he is another relevant actor in the international limelight, and who knows, he might come out in due time with his own filmpje.

The sarcastic tone is intended. Because, actually, what all this brouhaha shall bring? That is hard to predict. In principle, if one compares elections programs in NL today, it looks like Groenlinks has infiltrated thinkers in any other political party. Sustainability is a mainstream mantra,and even grisly right wingers talk about more money and more attention to the cause of clean air and better environment. But I keep on wondering, how much of this is to become real? Meanwhile my son takes swimming lessons in one of the two public swimming pools of Utrecht, both artificially heated, I look at the grey sky. Are we as collective willing to make the hard decisions that a reduction of pollution imply? I must say that I doubt it. Outside this bar there is a bunch of bicycles parked, from so many other parents waiting for their children. Few meters away, a busy road streams with cars, or diesel buses. Even here, in the small and flat Utrecht, cars are a main transport media. And let's not even begin with the mass consumption of energy, produced in fossil energy-guzzling factories. Our societies today consume far too much, and whether we like it or not, our lifestyle is not sustainable. Probably a election campaign is not the right moment to make headlines with it, but we should know better. The support of our life standards is costing the extinction of whole ecosystems and the poverty of a big part of the world, beyond our neat dams. To take the Stern report seriously would mean to rethink almost every step of our life. Are we able to do it? Are Gore and the Stern report enough to convince us? Or, to put a far more disgusting question: are we able to grooeimee at all, if we are to keep it sustainable?