OBLIGATORY NAZI REFERENCE:

Can There Be Hope After Copenhagen? (Javier Sethness, 30 December, 2009, Countercurrents.org)

[I]t should be clear that the failure of the Copenhagen summit reflects a profound indifference among the powerful of the world toward suffering humanity—a form of coldness, an “inability to identify with others,” that, in Adorno’s view, was instrumental in allowing for the emergence of Auschwitz. Considering the clearly horrendous toll climate change stands to have on human life across the globe, the ease with which premier U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern dismissed the historical responsibility of industrial-capitalist societies for the climate predicament during the Copenhagen talks is in ways reminiscent of Adolf Eichmann’s claim, when facing prosecution for his crimes against European Jewry, that “[r]epentance is for little children”. The radical evil represented by climate change—the 300,000 people who in the present die each year due to the dangerous anthropogenic interference with the world’s atmosphere that has already taken place, as well of course as the various horrifying life-negations that global warming stands to visit upon the peoples of Earth—has it seems become banal, in the sense that constituted power finds little reason in the prospect of the mass suffering and death that results from climate change to recognize the present as an emergency necessitating radical action.

They can strll hope, they just won't get change out of the UR.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 30, 2009 2:43 PM