Tomorrow
Will Be Too Late
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We invite readers to consider the following article, originally published at The Tricontinental. Please return here to offer us your comments—the Editors. Dear Friends,
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. In 1992, Fidel Castro of Cuba went to Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) for the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development to announce, ‘Tomorrow will be too late to do what we should have done a long time ago’. He meant take precautions against the detritus of carbon-driven capitalism and move towards an ecological socialist system. The committee to govern the world – as the Group of 7 likes to see itself – went home and disregarded the Rio protocols. Cuba had other ideas. Four years before the Rio conference, the UN’s World Meteorological Organisation and the UN Environment Programme set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). There was worry that environmental destruction was not only injurious to the planet and its people, but that it had hastened the demise of the possibility of life on earth. The IPCC had a very straightforward mandate – to study the risk of human-induced climate change, to assess its potential impacts and to offer possible options for prevention. The IPCC, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for warning about the catastrophic implications of carbon-induced capitalism, produced five major assessment reports and a number of special reports. Read more (Link to article at The Tricontinental) |
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