SolarPlexus

Well, here we are - 2009 has begun.

Many will view this new year with a sense of foreboding: money worries prevail, and some worry that economic recession will become depression.

Let us take a moment to put this into perspective. Did you put food in your belly this morning, and are you warm? Is this the same situation as this time last year? If the answer is yes, then be thankful that what really matters hasn’t changed for you.

Can’t afford that new flatscreen TV yet, or are you cutting corners with your holiday bookings? Yes? Well, boo-hoo. Move along, suck it up and thank Kelloggs that your family has eaten. Many go without food, and have done for years, and will continue to do so.

Meanwhile, the media presents footage of obese single parents with obese children, complaining that they can’t afford their fast-food take-aways, against a backdrop of leather sofa, Sky telly and Playstation. Or, picture if you will, unemployed ‘Stan’ who claims he hasn’t eaten for a week, being filmed shakily opening a new packet of fags.

The mind boggles. Are we so blinkered that we now view luxuries as a state-given right? Lord help us.

Happy 2009 to us all - but especially to those who genuinely struggle to put food on the table…

“Today, we (the EU) are around three percentage points below 1990 levels, whereas the US emissions have risen by more than 30 per cent since 1990. And according to the US Department of Energy, US emissions are expected to rise further.”
Source: extract from a speech by John Bruton, EU Ambassador to the US, talking about CO2 emissions.

How can the Bush administration continue to hold the argument that to limit US emissions would damage the economy and cost jobs? Some hold the view that the human contribution to global warming has yet to be proved as significant. Regardless of significance, no-one can deny that our activity does have an effect.

Let’s be clear about this: global warming will damage the US (and world) economy all by itself. Adverse effects include damage caused by increasingly extreme weather; stress on water resources; public health; desertification and population migration, to name only a few.

I find it alarming that the world’s remaining superpower, the nation that has tasked itself the role of global policeman, continues to cock a snook at the rest of us. How can the so-called “developed world” take the moral high-ground when asking emerging industrial nations to clean up their act?

And before anyone claims that the EU’s emissions are not particularly small taken in isolation, I am all too aware of that. We can all do more to reduce resource squandering. Can any of us claim, hand-on-heart, that they’ve never made an unnecessary car journey?

Climate change awareness has to be our new religion.