Priorities

While the vast majority of the US is focused on trivialities--like the presidential campaign, or the National Intelligence Estimate on Iran--the future of the entire world is being hashed out in Bali.  And as always, the US government is crystal clear about what matters most:

China wants developed nations like the U.S. to share cutting-edge renewable-energy technology with the developing world at reduced costs, in order to help poor nations cut their dependence on fossil fuels.

But the idea is generating tensions with U.S. officials, because American companies don't want to sell this new technology at cut-rate prices. The officials also worry that innovative technologies could be illegally copied if they are deployed in China. ...

[U.S. officials] vowed to reject any fund structure that might slash incentives for U.S. companies to develop new technologies.

"We do not support a technology-transfer fund that would buy down intellectual-property rights," Harlan Watson, head of the U.S. delegation, told delegates Tuesday.

(NB: You may have to refresh the page to get the full article to display.)

So just as the US has prioritized corporate profits and corporate privilege over human life on a massive scale in the case of AIDS, in the case of global warming it prioritizes them over the continuation of life as we know it on this planet.  It's truly a stunning testament to the level of control that corporations exert, directly and indirectly, over this country.  And let us never forget that this is quintessentially bipartisan; in each of these cases, both in the Clinton and Bush administrations, this central priority has never wavered.

I sometimes imagine aliens interviewing the last survivor from Earth, who just happens to be one of the ideological progeny of the aforementioned Harlan Watson.  They'd ask him how we could have possibly allowed the entire planet to go down the tubes.  Couldn't we see what was happening?  Didn't we understand what was required to keep it from becoming a global catastrophe?  Why, yes, the last human being would respond.  We knew exactly what needed to be done.  But it wouldn't have been profitable.

(The aliens would then flush him out the airlock, to make absolutely sure there'd be no chance that this race of monsters would ever trouble the universe again.)

Comments

[Thomas Daulton]

Of course, it goes without saying that the U.S. Federal Government, with its gigantic weapons labs and nuclear engery labs run by the government, couldn't _directly_ develop anti-greenhouse technologies with taxpayer money, which would (a) create high-tech jobs; (b) help save the planet and therefore help save US lives and environment; (c) help private companies make money by cutting waste and energy use; and (d) assure that there would be no intellectual property restrictions, on materials developed with taxpayer money, so they could therefore be shared by the world. Because... because... ummm... because government just doesn't work that way anymore. The Age of Big Government is over, thank God!