On Sunday on our way to the UN conference center in Cancun to pick up our credentials as official NGO observers for the Sierra Club, Tyla and I struck up a conversation with a young delegate from Kenya. His first question for us was, "Has the USA softened its stance on ratifying the Kyoto Protocol?" When I told him "no chance" he just laughed -- a knowing laugh of frustration that the US, the largest economy in the world and historically the largest carbon emitter still fails to make any longterm commitment to CO2 reductions.
Moments before I had read on my Blackberry that Oxford University’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research is to release a study on Monday, the first day of the UN Climate Conference that predicts one billion people could lose their homes to climate change (sea level rise, droughts, crop failure, etc) by 2100. The African continent will be hard hit by drought and desertification. But US citizens are already losing their homes to climate change on the Alaskan coast (ironically, Sarah Palin's home state) where the US government is spending tens of millions of dollars to relocate native Alaskans whose fishing villages have fallen into the sea, having lost the protection of sea ice that once protected them from winter storms.
After picking up our credentials, we scoped out the Cancun Messe, the venue where many of the programs of the two week climate conference will be held and where our Sierra Club delegation will meet regularly for briefings and strategy sessions. Not far away from our meeting room is the official US Delegation exhibit area. As Tyla and I walked past with workman busily setting up the USA display, it seemed to me that as many bad actors as there are on climate change among the Nation’s of the world, US citizens are in no position to criticize any others until we get our own house in order.
With the all too recent election of flat earthers to the US 112th Congress, we have two years to turn this around. 2012 needs to be the year we elect a Congress dedicated to addressing climate change. There is no time to waste.
-- Glen Besa and Tyla Matteson, of Virginia, are two of forty people from the Sierra Club attending the UN Climate Conference as official observers.
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