High level talks to save the planet have to be a good thing, right? So why is everyone so disillusioned a week after they started? Why are the cocaine-producing countries using words like “selfish” and “predatory” when referring to the CO2-producing countries?
Archbishop Tutu kicked it off on a fairly sensible note by pointing out that this is the only home we have. In a weird display of misplaced schadenfreude, he shrieked with delight at the notion that even the rich are doomed to die alongside the poor.
Then he lost it on the dismount by yabbling about Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden. Correct me if I’m wrong, but legends, myths and fairy tales are about as useful at a scientific conference as a nosebag of sand for a camel. You may as well stand up and say that if we don’t stop using fossil fuels, all the unicorns will die.
A lot of money is wasted on talk shops of this magnitude. But it’s not all a lost cause. In Cancun, delegates pigged out on paella and peyote. In Durban, they are growing fat and mad on fine curry and even better marijuana. Forget the Kyoto Protocol or the Durban Declaration or whatever they call it this time around. If delegates are able to remember how immaculately stoned they got, or what a magnificent animal is the mutton bunny chow at 2am, then Durban will score big time in the tourism stakes. That’s what matters. Why should we care what kind of planet our great-great-grandchildren inherit? Our own kids are firmly on a trajectory to hell. Can you imagine how much worse they’ll be three generations down the line? Their music alone will be so appalling that our planet will voluntarily check into the celestial equivalent of Dignitas.
Bishop Geoff Davies described climate change as “the greatest threat to ever confront humanity”. What rubbish. The greatest threat to humanity comes from organised religion and those who wield political power. Greed and militant proselytizing will kill a lot more people than global warming.
While thousands of well-fed delegates haggled over the price of this planet – as if it were a chicken in a Somali refugee camp – I was up the north coast on a holiday from hell. I went to the beach and returned with great gobs of crude oil clinging to my feet. My toes looked like dying creatures crying out to be cleansed by a Greenpeace volunteer, preferably one with an unhealthy foot fetish and an incomprehensible Scandinavian accent.
While Brenda slept off the Rohypnol and raspberry cocktail, I loaded up a case of beer and drove to Durban to alert the authorities that a Valdez-type situation was developing up the road. I thought someone might care. Someone like Angelina Jolie, perhaps, who would thank me over and over again in the privacy of the Hilton Hotel penthouse for my selfless efforts to save the earth.
Security at the conference centre was pretty tight but so was I and that evened the odds. The men in black doubted I was a delegate, even though I was unshaven, wild of hair and eye and tracking bunker oil through the climate-controlled entrance. I tried telling them that genuine eco-warriors don’t sashay about in designer suits and faux Parisian knock-off frocks but they escorted me to the perimeter and warned me never to return. I was outraged.
On the way back to Zinkwazi, I stopped and bought two cans of deodorant and sprayed them directly at the ozone layer. That’ll teach them to reject me.
