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Archive for January 29th, 2011
Bailing on Climate Change
First Obama, now Ban-Ki Moon, the U.N. Secretary General, according to the Guardian:
In a strategic shift, Ban will redirect his efforts from trying to encourage movement in the international climate change negotiations to a broader agenda of promoting clean energy and sustainable development, senior UN officials said.
The officials said the change in focus reflected Ban’s realisation, after his deep involvement with the failed Copenhagen summit in 2009, that world leaders are not prepared to come together in a sweeping agreement on global warming ““ at least not for the next few years.
Hmm, anyone seeing a trend here?
Of course, I don’t think either Obama or Ban are actually giving up on the climate change cause. They’re just going about it differently, one might even say obliquely.
On a related note, I see the U.N. Secretary General is in another story, reported from Davos:
The world’s current economic model is an environmental “global suicide pact” that will result in disaster if it isn’t reformed, Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary general, warned today.
So what do we do?
We need a revolution,” he told a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on how best to make the global economy sustainable. “Climate change is also showing us that the old model is more than obsolete.”
I’m down with that, but a few more details please. Otherwise, for inspiration, I’ll turn to these guys.
My favorite part of that story comes at the end:
The panel moderator, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, said he hoped next year participants would return to the Swiss ski resort “and be able to say that a molecule of CO2 was actually affected by what we say and do here”.
Pray tell, does this mean solar panels are going up on the roof here?
Texas Taliban Snark
Via Daily Kos, I came across this astonishing, mind-blowing quote from Texas Governor Rick Perry:
I am concerned that some the highly diverse Magnet public schools in this city are becoming hotbeds for liberalism. Do we really need free school bus service, Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Asian-Pacific Heritage Month, ESL, special needs and enrichment programs like music, art or math Olympiad? I think we should get back to the basics of the three Rs, reading writing and arithmetic. I mean when is the last time a 6th grade science fair project yielded a cure for a disease?
I mean, that’s just so buggered that my first reaction is that it’s a joke. What sane public official could utter such lunacy? But I kept reading the post and come across this equally whacked Perry quote:
I really don’t see why high schools should have to teach college level courses like calculus, economics, physics, chemistry or biology. Not all children go to college anyway. Texas has plenty of on the job training programs that teach skills and trades. Oil field workers need to know how to operate machines that extract oil. They don’t need calculus to do their job.
Evidently, Perry was speaking to conservative business leaders at a luncheon in Houston and the press corp is mentioned as being there. So that’s it, I figure something like this has to be covered in bold print by the Houston Chronicle and other Texas publications. Nada.
Now I’m suspicious. So I scroll down to the comments at Daily Kos and see that the whole post is a joke and readers are pissed.
Lots of people, including PZ Myers, got fooled, which I find amusing. I guess atheists can be just as credulous as believers.
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