IPCC 2009: Memories of times past and time lost
In 2009, I had the privilege of working with Donald Brown, who has a new book and also writes of Dr. Robert Brulle's new study documenting the immorality of climate deniers and their funding, Chris Cuomo and others on the press release of the Ethics Committee that was delivered at COP15 in Copenhagen for the IPCC, when I was a formal observer for the University of Colorado. The following iteration was one of the versions I worked on then. Shortly afterwards, as I blogged in the High Tide COP15 Project, the Danish government went into full panic mode. Police attacked peaceful demonstrators. They shut down the conference, and everyone went home. The global fossil fuel industries went to work on smear and disinformation campaigns against activists and scientists alike. The world has squandered precious time and lives while climate change has accelerated. J'accuse the fossil fuel industry for their frantic, amoral scramble to amass ever greater profits at the expense of the entire world.
The press conference has been called by the
Collaborative Program on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change (EDCC. EDCC
is a program comprised of 17 institutions around the world working on climate
change ethics and whose secretariat is the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State
University. Other members of the EDCC include the IUCN Ethics Working Group, the
Bahai, etc, etc, and individual ethicists from around the world working on the
ethical dimensions of climate change. Interested individuals can contact EDCC
program coordinator Don Brown at dab57@psu.edu
or Dr. Nancy Tuana, Director of the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University at Ntuana@psu.edu
Press Release
Press Conference on
Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change
Friday, December 11, 2009 9:30 am, Press Conference Room
The Crucial Missing Element in the
Climate Change Negotiations: Duties and Responsibilities, Not Just Narrow
National Economic Interest.
Ethics is a practical issue. Tuvalo’s demand for a binding
agreement illustrated the Ethical
challenges of the negotiations. To make climate justice operational, ethics
issue must be included in the text. Ethicists from around the world call on those
nations opposing meaningful commitments. Do you deny duties and
responsibilities to:
- Tens of millions of Africans
whose food and water supply is threatened by increasing drought
- Small island states who see their
very existence jeopardized by rising seas
- Much of central Asia faces losing
their fresh water supply as the Himalayan glaciers melt
Many parties continue to
justify their positions in climate change negotiations based on their economic
interests alone. Climate change is a matter of justice and morality. COP15
commitments must take responsibility, to protect the poorest peoples and
richest ecosystems, who will suffer the direst consequences of climate change.
The COP15 is struggling with the gap between commitments and
implementation. Previous failures have created a lack of trust in the process.
Parties need to agree on how to make climate justice operational in the text. This
press conference examines how nations must negotiate if they acknowledge their
duties and responsibilities
-
to
prevent dangerous climate change
-
to pay
for harms caused by high levels of greenhouse gas emissions
-
to
prevent deforestation programs
-
to enable
transfer of sustainable energy technologies to poor nations.
This press conference will assist the media in understanding
how some parties are taking ethical responsibility while others employ naked
self-interest to justify their negotiating positions.