Mark Lynas’s insider report offers an illuminating and depressing analysis of Chinese spoiling tactics at Copenhagen. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/22/copenhagen-climate-change-mark-lynas)

If the current regime in China are resolved to fight the very notion of verifiable targets then the urgent challenge of the next decade is how we bring the Chinese inside the tent .

As a major exporter of coal, Australia has a huge moral obligation to start exerting diplomatic and commercial pressure. Coal investors will only start getting nervous when China stops buying or Australia refuses to keep supplying the stuff.

As we contemplate what happened at COP15 I think we could do well to ponder Thomas Kuhn and his thoughts about the dynamics of scientific paradigm shifts. He suggests, if you recall, that these shifts are discontinuous and never come from adding bits at the edges of the existing paradigm (my paraphrasing). Kuhn proposed that the new paradigm emerges when the evidence accumulates and shows that the old paradigm is not meeting our needs. And as you indicate – this condition is being met. The second condition he suggests is the new way (paradigm) being described by others, who are able to make this conceptual leap, so those who have not yet made the conceptual leap, can ‘see’ what it will be like.

What I love most about your post Paul, is that it starts to create a vision of the future. More accurately, you envision a transition to the new paradigm. I suggest that we need more visioning – lots of it by many people (in local communities if at all possible)! The visioning will provide something people can move towards and allow a ‘letting go’ of the old paradigm.

Maybe what we hoped for at COP15 was a solution that was really a fiddling at the edges of the old paradigm – a quick fix. And so was doomed anyway – it was never the ‘real deal’. Maybe what may emerge now (and would have emerged at some point anyway, because it has to), in the chaos of adaption at the edges different systems (and nations) as you describe it, is the real paradigm shift.

We have a belief that change should be planned and orderly, but my understanding from the organisational world, is that real, successful and sustainable change, is in fact, emergent and chaotic – even if people make it sound like it was a planned path after the event.

So let’s get used to working with people’s passion and enthusiasm at the grass roots (this is where the real energy is); let’s get used to the idea that the future is unpredictable over time and geographical space; let’s get used to ‘not knowing’ the entire pathway to the new future; and let’s all get used to taking some personal responsibility for our collective future.

Many thanks to you Paul – hope you have a great break and return in 2010 as vibrant as ever!

Matthew 19:24 “Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

Something in the character of man seems to make the desire to be powerful mutulally exclusive from the need to service the common good..

If he exists.. The Devil must be laughing himself silly…

So please keep up the good work Paul. You have a devoted follower in me

Living in Queensland I read that our population has increased 30 % over a period. In the same period our power consumption has increased 90% in the same period – witness houses designed for southern, cooler climes now made comfortable by air-conditioners. Where is the public uprising to demonise the air conditioner buyers? Where is the publicity campaign and government incentive to force the use of ceiling fans and well-ventilated house designs, as an example?

The Earth cannot sustain our greedy living. As consumers we just don’t get it!

Not according to India and China who have protected their continued economic growth along the same route. Reading the leaks from inside the dealing room at Copenhagen (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/22/copenhagen-climate-change-mark-lynas) suggests China isn’t viewing this in the same light.

I’d be interested in your views on potential trade wars flowing out of this in the future, Europe slapping a carbon tax on Chinese imports for example.