A bit of unintentional humor from Montreal

From today's The Independent, a report from the UN climate conference now wrapping up (with the US and Australia still out of the fold, as expected) in Montreal:

At a briefing on Wednesday, the senior US official, Paula Dobriansky, the undersecretary of state for global affairs, declared: "We firmly believe negotiations will not reap progress ... We have concerns about formalised discussions that provide a basis for negotiations. We believe progress cannot be made that way."

She said this while maintaining with a straight face that the US - which accounts for 25 per cent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions - was acting as a beacon to the rest of the planet when it came to tackling climate change. "We lead the world in climate change science - $2bn (£1.14bn) this year," she said.

In a way, these claims are quite humorous, as they border upon farce. Global climate change is a collective action problem that cannot be solved without an international agreement, and the main US delegate to the conference (charged, as usual, with impeding any progress at the meetings) publicly claims that formal discussions are a poor basis for negotiations, and that negotiations are a wrongheaded path to such an agreement. Moreoever, since the only way to address climate change is by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, she adds that the US - which has stubbornly opposed any binding measures to limit such emissions (at all levels of governance) - touts itself as "a beacon for the rest of the planet" for its refusal to take any meaningful action to reduce these harmful emissions, referring to the amount of money spent domestically on research (whose results, at least when not bought and paid for by the oil industry, it continues to challenge as "inconclusive" and not representing "sound science") as evidence of its commitment to "progress" (where further study is used as a deliberate pretext for indefinitely forestalling meaningful action).

Though I'm angered and ashamed by my government's shortsighted and selfish intransigence on this critical issue, I am impressed with its ability at farce and self-parody. Brilliant!