The pluses and minuses of saying "It's now or never"

This is the logo and slogan of the organization for which I have technically signed up to be a "Precinct Captain," though no one has yet informed me of what specific responsibilities come with this position.  I think I'll wait until after the Focus the Nation town hall meeting I'm trying to help organize before I go out of my way to find out.

At any rate, the "1 Chance" referred to here may well be COP15, the negotiations that will take place in Copenhagen this December to try to hammer out a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol (COP apparently stands for Conference of the Parties).  Al Gore, whose comments to this effect are linked from the COP15 website, and several of the distinguished speakers at Power Shift 2009 were of the opinion that if these negotiations fail to produce a real global commitment to action, irrevocable climate catastrophe is basically assured.  There will simply not be enough time to get the world started down the right path.

On the one hand, this kind of urgency makes it easy to commit to action, because nobody (other than certain Christian fundamentalists) wants to see the end of the world as we know it.  But on the other hand, it also makes despair very easy, because international negotiations frequently collapse, and when they "succeed" they usually result in a compromise that contains few if any binding commitments to action.  Even the Kyoto Protocol itself, which did place a binding commitment on its First-World signatories "to reduce their collective GHG emissions by 5.2% compared to the year 1990," will depend for its success on "the stark decline in Eastern European countries' emissions after the fall of communism," which occurred well before the treaty was even drafted.  "As of year-end 2006, the United Kingdom and Sweden were the only EU countries on pace to meet their Kyoto emissions commitments by 2010."

Do we really think that eight months is enough time to bully our leaders into making sure that sort of thing doesn't happen this time?  It's one thing to claim, as Van Jones does, that my generation was born to change the world.  It's quite another to set such a hard, near-term deadline for that to happen.

I almost prefer James Lovelock's belief that we're already doomed to a new hotter climate equilibrium, and all we can hope to influence is how long it takes to establish itself.  In that case, any progress we make this year would at least be an incremental step toward having a decent length of time available to migrate toward the poles.