„I am just a poor boy
Though my story’s seldom told,
I have squandered my resistance
For a pocket full of mumbles, such are promises
All lies and jests
Still a man hears what he wants to hear
And disregards the rest“„The Boxer“ by Simon & Garfunkel
„The hollow cheering of success at the end of COP21 agreement proved yet again that people will hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest. What people wanted to hear was that an agreement had been reached on climate change that would save the world while leaving lifestyles and aspirations unchanged.“
„The favoured method is to out-compete the fossil fuel industry by providing biomass for power stations. This involves rapidly growing trees and grasses faster than nature has ever done on land we don’t have, then burning it in power stations that will capture and compress the CO2 using an infrastructure we don’t have and with technology that won’t work on the scale we need and to finally store it in places we can’t find.“
„Our backs are against the wall and we must now start the process of preparing for geo-engineering. We must do this in the knowledge that its chances of success are small and the risks of implementation are great.We must look at the full spectrum of geoengineering. This will cover initiatives that increase carbon sequestration by restoration of rain forests to the seeding of oceans. It will extend to solar radiation management techniques such as artificially whitening clouds and, in extremis, replicating the aerosols from volcanic activity. It will have to look at what areas that we selectively target, such as the methane emitting regions of the Arctic and which areas we avoid.
The high political and environmental risks associated with this must be made clear so that it is never used as an alternative to making the carbon cuts that are urgently needed. Instead cognisance of these must be used to challenge the narrative of wishful thinking that has infested the climate change talks for the past twenty one years and which reached its zenith with the CO21 agreement. In today’s international vacuum on this, it is imperative that our government takes a lead.“
Wenn wir dermaßen mit dem Rücken zur Wand stehen, sollten wir vielleicht wenigstens unsere Scheuklappen abnehmen und mal nach Links, Rechts, Oben und Unten schauen. Eine andere Welt ist nämlich möglich und auch denkbar. Eine Welt, beispielsweise, in der das Überleben ganzer Inselvölker nicht zur Disposition steht, wohl aber der amerikanische Lebensstil.
Um das mit David Bowie zu sagen:
„I can remember
Standing, by the wall
And the guns shot above our heads
And we kissed,
as though nothing could fall
And the shame was on the other side
Oh we can beat them, for ever and ever
Then we could be Heroes,
just for one day“