90 per cent of the funds needed to address global warming will derive from the private sector, Mr. Kerim said
"We don't want climate change to be reduced to an environmental issue," he told reporters after speaking at the event. "It is rather an issue of sustainable development and sustainable development must be based on economic growth."One of the more surreal moments of my recent hospital stay was listening to Barbara Boxer list the goals of the Senate Bill on Global Warming, as she ran down the things it would have to do:
Reduce greenhouse gases to avoid catastrophic climate changeConsidering how American workers are already getting impacted that seems more than a little sketchy.
Encourage a robust economy and growth
Do this without impacting American workers
Far more surreal was Thomas Friedman's hyping his new book Hot, Flat, and Crowded on CSPAN's BookTV.
I don't want to get lengthy on either topic right at the moment, but a thought I had earlier today, under trees I knew well in a park I played in as a boy many years ago, was how much despair there must be out there now - the debilitating sense of hopelessness hitting the best of us, the clearest-eyed, the most knowledgeable.
Friedman comes on like this is all fresh news and he's in on the ground floor, ready for the green revolution. But I was hearing people talk about global warming inducing catastrophic climate change back in the 80's. The mantra of "We need to do something now, before it's too late" began then, or even more marginally, before then.
Where are those voices today? I don't mean voices like that, I mean those same people. How false to pretend they were never there.
They were right, this is obvious, but there's a mask on the public face of things, a rigid mask that doesn't allow that kind of acknowledging, that kind of historical deference. It has to own everything the common folk think about the world - it has to hand-feed knowledge to them.
What's under that mask?
Raw evil I think, a visage so disgusting and horrible no human tongue can tell its features.
I'm pretty sure the multiple universe idea, or something like it, something that opens out to other worlds, other ways of being, is key to understanding this. To explaining how this has happened. It's a childish thought that, given the existence of parallel worlds, there could be no cross-contact, or no meta-existence, no being, or beings, with a presence in many worlds at once.
This opens a path toward a scientifically valid view of the divine in some form, if not in the trademarked and proprietary forms we've inherited. But it opens just as much to the diabolical.
It could explain the constant refrain of unimportance and disregard for what happens here; it could also explain, if those beings were immortal, god-like, the bizarre taboos and prohibitions and hypocrisies of institutional religions.
What I'm poking at there is the idea that the next levels up are possibly a lot like this one, filled with opportunists and scam-artists and danger, where the virtuous and the noble are beleaguered and outnumbered, just like they are here, now.
What we want, what I want anyway and I think it's a pretty common hunger, is refuge, entry to that paradise where strife is no longer, where there is no conflict, no sickness, no toil, no danger. To deserve that somehow, cringing at self-knowledge, how undeserving I am.
I'll leave that meditation to another time though, what I wanted to record here tonight is a recognition - that too many people out there must be suffering despair in isolation, because nothing unites us around this, not in the larger culture anyway.
I've been doing some informal polling, of nurses and aides at the hospital, clerks in stores in town when I got out, relatively random samplings. The gamut runs from it's too late to it's very late, almost no one denies its validity, its actuality.
In that role as survey-taker I'm able to withhold my own view, people don't ask about it for one thing. For another I'm closed to it, held back from communicating the weight of how it really feels, too much formless emptiness, that sense of everything sucked out and eaten up, oxidizing; watching the weakest carrying silly torches and ridiculous banners, the worst leering and smug, almost gloating - some Texan pol in a powder-blue suit harping on the price of fuel as though that's all that matters - the naive and the innocent still not infected by the grim news. Cynical hedonism gains, virtue and self-sacrifice depreciate.
Selfishness has its one goal intact right to the end, selflessness needs faith, and hope.
One risk in communicating your own despair is you'll drag someone else down with you, someone who's kept more hope, or innocence.
And without some plan, some way forward, something to do, what good can come from facing what's too big and final to see anyway? Best to ignore it. Or pray.
