The Comment Factory

A Financial Times survey of five leading UK-listed mining groups – Rio Tinto, Vedanta, Anglo American, Xstrata and BHP Billiton – has found the number of fatalities has stayed the same since 2004. Anglo American is the only miner surveyed that has reduced fatality figures consistently, though its volume of deaths is the highest

Meanwhile, the call to “mobilize” 100 billion dollars in climate financing by 2020 is vapor. As Hugo Chavez said, “If the climate were one of the biggest capitalist banks, the rich governments would have saved it.” Instead within a decade we’ll muster up a year’s worth of US government spending on bombing villagers in Waziristan. Washington’s priorities are clear. Saving AIG is more important than saving the planet

At the 3 degrees rise predicted by the UN on the basis of current negotiating positions, you can declare the game over. That is potentially the tipping point beyond which it is impossible to regain any control over global temperatures, the point at which positive feedback mechanisms cause temperatures to increase exponentially. I cannot adequately describe the full horror of such a scenario – the food shortages, the droughts, the floods, the fleeing of millions of people from newly uninhabitable territory, the intensified geopolitical competition over basic resources, the extinction of half or more of the species on the planet… it’s just unthinkable. But, as Copenhagen shows, unthinkable horror is exactly what the rulers of the world have in store for us

That said, the rich world’s motivations for backing the Fund are hardly charitable. The Pentagon has already identified climate change as “threat multiplier.” By threatening food and water supplies, a warmer world undermines the stability of cooperative regimes, like Pakistan’s, central to U.S. strategy. Retired four star Marine General Anthony Zinni puts the American position in stark words. “We will pay for this one way or another,” General Zinni says of climate change. “Either we take an economic hit of some kind, or we pay the price later in military terms. And that will cost human lives.”

The feeling that a potentially powerful global movement is being hijacked by some very slick PR is keeping me away from Denmark. The talk around and within the conference seems to be an exercise in appearing to make a difference without actually changing a damn thing

When the entire yearly budget of the National Science Foundation is less than what we squander in one month in Iraq, our leaders have the nation’s priorities wrongly set

The metaphorical conception of oil as the earth’s blood is only too accurate; we are bleeding it dry and the life-force we have invested far too much in will soon give up on us. Nature will have her revenge, she is already displaying her destructive potential, flexing her muscles, and we need look no further than our temperate little island to see the effects (in terms of unprecedented weather patterns and consistent meteorological anomalies)

Nikola Tesla can rightly be considered the godfather of the 20th Century and beyond. When discussing the lack of credit for his achievements, Tesla once remarked: “The present is theirs, the future, for which I have really worked is mine.”

Ahmadreza Tavassoli talks to Iranian scientist and MIT professor Dara Entekhabi about the major problems facing the world’s environment, the way out of the mess, and the prospects for the Iranian scientific community.