William Marsden - Fools Rule: Inside the Failed Politics of Climate Change

As Marsdens book amply demonstrates, a new course on addressing climate change is essential if were going to save more human lives in the future.

The Georgia Straight

The more I read I realized that William Marsden had found the right people to talk to, had identified who the players wereand also what the story was. And then it hit me: This guy really knows how to tell a story!

Steven Guilbeault, The Gazette

With lively prose and a healthy serving of sarcasm and welcome indignation Marsden brings levity to this analysis of the failure of the Copenhagen and Cancun climate summits.

Publishers Weekly

Praise for STUPID TO THE LAST DROP
Winner of the National Business Book Award

A must-read for every Canadian and for everyone around the world that idealizes and mythologizes Canada as a bastion of environmental stewardship.

GreenMuze

[Marsden brings] a fresh pair of discerning eyes to an unusual series of nation-changing events. He confidently reports how an entire province is destroying itself, and then asks why no one in Canada seems to care.

The Globe and Mail

A gripping and horrifying account of how the province of Alberta and the U.S. are ripping up tens of thousands of square kilometers of vital natural habitat to extract bitumen from the oil sands in one of the most murderously polluting processes available to human beings.

New Statesman

Also by William Marsden

Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (and Doesnt Seem to Care)
Angels of Death: Inside the Bikers Empire of Crime (with Julian Sher)
The Road to Hell: How the Biker Gangs Are Conquering Canada (with Julian Sher)

VINTAGE CANADA EDITION, 2012

Copyright 2011 William Marsden
Epilogue 2012 Wiliam Marsden

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, in 2012. Originally published in hardcover in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, in 2011. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited.

Vintage Canada with colophon is a registered trademark.

www.randomhouse.ca

All photographs by William Marsden.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Marsden, William

Fools rule : inside the failed politics of climate change / William Marsden.

eISBN: 978-0-307-36673-3

1. Climatic changesGovernment policyInternational cooperation. 2. Climatic changesPolitical aspects. I. Title. II. Title: Inside the failed politics of climate change.

QC 903. M 37 2012 363.73874526 C 2011-903142-6

cover design: Jennifer Lum
Cover image: JoannaBlu/Getty Images
Map: Erin Cooper

v3.1

To my mother, who looked for the best in everyone;
to my father, who disagreed

We are blind we pervert reason when we humiliate life. Human dignity is insulted every day by the powerful of our world; the universal lie has replaced the plural truths; man stopped respecting himself when he lost the respect due to his fellow-creatures.

Jos Saramago

I think not saving energy is insanity. It is insanity from every point of view. It is insanity from economics; it is insanity from the prognostication of what is going to occur. It is so obvious, and it is so easy to do.

Dr. Digby McLaren, president of the Royal Society of Canada and former director of the Canadian Geological Survey, testifying before a Canadian Parliamentary Committee on climate change, April 1990.

The ultimate objective of this Convention and any related legal instruments that the Conference of the Parties may adopt is to achieve stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.

United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 1992.

A RNE B ANG M IKKELSEN WAS A HAPPY MAN . A ND WHY NOT? T HE convention had gone as planned. His logistics were flawless.

During the two weeks from December 4 to 18, 2009, when world leaders met in Copenhagen and spectacularly failed to produce a global agreement on climate change, Arne found success in feeding and watering them. The enormous food production system that mankind had been perfecting over the last eight thousand yearsin the process conquering nature and altering normal climatic cycleshad worked. As chief executive of the huge hangar-like Bella Conference Center where the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) conference was held, he was really proud, he said, that during the thirteen-day event the appetites of 45,000 people had been well served, the multitude having consumed three hundred tons of food including fish, poultry, beef, vegetables, fresh fruit and Danish hot dogs (plse); 14,779 cakes (mostly apple strudel and chocolate squares); 350,000 glasses of water and 250,000 cups of coffee, plus thousands of bottles of beer and wine.

The only glitch was the long lineups into the convention itself, caused by a congested security system that forced some delegates to wait up to five hours in the cold of a Danish December before gaining entry. The UN has apologized for this and has taken on the full responsibility, Arne said. Nothing was gonna stick to Arne. From the Danish organizers point of view, the long queues were the only practical thing that did not function. It has created respect throughout the world, they said after the conference wrapped up and the world leaders and delegates had, as Greenpeace put it, fled the crime scene.

Arnes finest hour, however, was not to be found in the simple fact of having fed so many delegates. As he stated in his final communiqu after the conference, it was the record-time assembly and furnishing of thirty-eight private meeting rooms, which the Americans and Chinese had ordered up with only three days left in the negotiations, that really showed his troops at their best.

Deep within the cavernous halls of Arnes Bella Center, where 192 nations struggled to quite possibly remake the world, it was in the seclusion of these rooms that a select group of world leaders leapfrogged the whole process and created what they called the Copenhagen Accord. Then they quickly saddled up their private jets and headed home to nations where the poor are clamoring for their fair share of the worlds wealth or, in the case of President Obama, into a violent Washington snowstorm where the clamoring comes from a moneyed elite of legal persons with names like Goldman Sachs, Exxon, Chevron and Kochthe pillars of Americas corporate democracy.