PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD
PLANNING AND LEADERSHIP FOR A BETTER WORLD This post from Steve Zwick over at EKO-ECO is worth a serious read by anyone who thinks that government and academia aren't giving them their tax dollars' worth—and then some—of bureaucratic obfuscation and venal, time-wasting idiocy in the face of impending global disaster.
It's about what major media might report on as: "The hard job of hammering out acceptable compromises on details of climate change, policy and mutual obligation," preparatory to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change's Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen, later this year, which is supposed to produce the successor document to the Kyoto Protocol. And it serves the purpose of convincing this gentle reader that investing in rural hill property in Pennsylvania and developing it as extreme sports beachfront is probably a good idea.
The article focuses on the mission of Filipino Prof. Tony La Vina, who facilitates the aspect of the negotiations that concerns deforestation and forest degradation (the acronym for this, in climate-change jargon, is REDD). It's Prof. La Vina's unenviable job to take the existing 20-page segment of the current draft dealing with REDD and somehow persuade all stakeholders to allow it to be whittled to five comprehensible pages. In Zwick's words:
”The first 15 pages of the text are a mash-up of parenthetical sentence fragments embedded within other fragments and separated by colons, semi-colons, and dashes: to the uninitiated, pure gibberish, and to the initiated, mostly gibberish but with chunks of comprehensible thought floating in it.
"The last five pages, however, are clear and concise. That's because they came from Norway, while the previous 15 came from everywhere else.
"The Norwegians delivered their long and comprehensive 'submission' in an effort to provide some clarity, while other countries have been inserting sentences, words, and punctuation marks to underline their negotiating positions.
"So, La Vina can either use Norway's five pages as a base onto which he can cleave other submissions, or he can bang heads until the 15 pages of gibberish resemble ten pages of prose."
Zwick's very funny (and frustrated-sounding) article goes on to detail many aspects of the planned negotiating process, and gives rare insight into the atmosphere surrounding this mission-critical, but clearly badly broken exercise in consensus-building.
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