“Runaway Climate Change”: Inconvenient Truths Facing the COP21 Climate Conference
Conversations with Richard Heinberg, Dane Wigington and Guy McPherson. Global Research News Hour Episode 125
“The targets we’ve set are bold. And by empowering businesses, scientists, engineers, workers, and the private sector — investors — to work together, this agreement represents the best chance we’ve had to save the one planet that we’ve got.” –U.S. President Barack Obama, commenting on the adoption of the Paris Climate Agreement, December 12, 2015 [1]
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Length (59:24)
Click to download the audio (MP3 format)
The 21st annual UN climate conference of parties (COP21) gathered in Paris this year.
World leaders engaged in two weeks of intense negotiations geared at turning the tide on one of the greatest threats facing humanity, namely runaway climate change.
As of Saturday December 12, negotiations concluded with an agreement focused on keeping global temperatures below the agreed upon limit of 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, as well as $100 billion a year commitment in climate financing for developing countries.
The celebratory rhetoric and declarations of the ‘historic’ nature of this accord glosses over some of the complications involved in adequately confronting the fall-out from a society addicted to fossil fuels.
This week’s Global Research News Hour invites three analysts with three different perspectives related to fossil fuel dependence and climate change.
First we speak to Richard Heinberg. He is a Senior Fellow with the Post-Carbon Institute. He is a journalist, and author of a dozen books including The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (2003) and his most recent Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels (2015). Heinberg is considered one of the world’s leading educators on the subject of Peak Oil, the opposite side of the fossil fuel energy coin. In this interview he outlines the extent to which our society is dependent on cheap oil, why peak oil is still an issue in spite of $40 a barrel oil, how hydraulic fracturing and other new oil recovery technologies is generating an oil economy ‘bubble’ that is set to burst, and why transitioning to a “renewable energy” economy is much more complicated than many people anticipate.
Dane Wigington is a licensed contractor based in northern California and a former employee of Bechtel. The founder of the information site geoengineeringwatch.org, Wigington is convinced that geo-engineering is among the greatest threats facing humanity at present, He remarks that geo-engineering efforts such as Solar Radiation management and the (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) are not only harmful, but have been clandestinely pursued for decades. He expresses his thoughts about why weather modification is being pursued, how humanity and the ecosphere is being affected, and why there is so little public discussion about impacts of these programs even from traditional Climate activists.
Finally, we hear from Guy McPherson. He is a Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Arizona. He has spent years assembling and collating available peer-reviewed research on climate. On his blog Nature Bats Last is a ‘Monster Climate Essay‘ which leaves readers with the conclusion that there is virtually nothing that can be done to halt runaway climate change and the Near-Term Extinction of the human species. Dr. McPherson updates listeners on the most recent discoveries and the prospects of these Climate Meetings to accomplish much of anything of significance.
LISTEN TO THE SHOW
Length (59:24)
Click to download the audio (MP3 format)
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Notes:
1) http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/12/12/transcript-and-video-obama-praises-climate-deal/
