Flat-lining climate change

A new international climate change conference has come and gone in New york - so quickly you may not even have noticed it - after all it only lasted for one day.  It was the first major conference on the subject since the infamous gathering in Copenhagen in 2009, which as the Washington post's foreign policy magazine says, "ended with a dismal, eleventh-hour whimper".  

This meeting was an attempt to "defibrillate" an issue which has been flat-lining for several years, and was attended by over 100 heads of state, including the dutiful President Obama, but conspicuously absent were the heads of state of the new emerging big polluters, India and China, although the later did send a deputy prime minister.

There were a few big but almost ritualistic street processions and demonstrations leading up to the meeting, but from the meeting itself, hardly even a statement or communique.


If the issue of climate change, a few years ago, was literally such a burning issue, with bitter confrontations between climate change believers and climate sceptics, why does it arouse so little passion now?  Is it so polarised and politicised, with emerging nations suspicious that the whole idea is a conspiracy by the old rich countries to inhibit their economic growth and hold them back?  What right has the West to tell India to hold back their greenhouse gas emissions?

Is there the weary realisation that even if climate change is occurring, there is no proof that man's economic activities are responsible for it, and even if they were, there is nothing we can really do about it? The data that for the last five years or so there is little evidence of increase in temperatures or atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide?  

Or the inescapable conclusion that at the present time 'green' energy is too expensive, unless offset by huge subsidies which cash-strapped Western governments are increasingly loath to come up with, and too miniscule to make any significant contribution to a country's total energy needs (in no case, do wind turbines provide more than 2% to electricity generation), and the cancellation or shelving of grand projects, such as that to bring solar electric power from the north African Sahara to Europe?

Clothes, social issues and everything else are subject to fashion, and climate change is well, so... 2004, like Al Gore - remember him?
It seems that even the real problems of climate change will be shelved for at least another half century or more.  The fact is that the world is living, as Jack Lew said, in a golden age of fossil fuels.  There is still plenty of oil, and with fracking, a huge amount of gas.  When the last drop of oil or the last cubic centimetre of gas is burned, the world will turn to green energy.  Until then, not seriously.