The largest protest so far against the Toronto-area G8/G20 summits heads south on University Avenue from the Ontario legislature on Saturday afternoon. People were marching in support of a variety of causes, including the environment. (Timothy Neesam/CBC)

This is about how regular people have so little control over their own future, and little to say about whether the human race survives or not. It’s long and convoluted, but there are some interesting bits in it. In Obama’s speech at the end of the G20 today, he said that nations agree that fossil fuel use has to end and that they all have to work to get climate change stopped.  However, he didn’t elaborate.  There was a G20 “Climate agreement” and a document that I haven’t seen yet. It reportedly called for reductions in the use (or subsidies) of fossil fuels voluntarily, and President Obama pushed them to remove the “voluntary” wording, supposedly making it mandatory.  Even if it is mandatory, it’s still not an official climate agreement, and there is no way of enforcing it that I’m aware of. When I find the text of it, I will reprint it here.

Unfortunately, calling for governments to  keep on growing and spending and consuming and supporting bank health might sound good to people in America, and it’s what all the leaders did, but this is just more propping up a broken capitalistic system that’s falling apart, instead of inventing a new and more equitable economic system for everyone. That system should be based on renewable energy and ending hunger and poverty. Instead, they want to save all the banks. Everything world leaders and Obama and our Congress is doing amounts to putting Bandaids on an unsustainable system.

What we need right now is a better system, one that phases out constant consumption, waste and corruption, and takes all the money out of politics.  Money in politics is the main reason why we have no climate change bill. We have an economic system that feeds on itself, looping itself in with our politics, and that is bound to fail.  Unlimited growth on a limited planet will be disastrous, and we are already seeing evidence of that. It’s harder and harder to get the oil and the coal out of the ground, because there is less of it, yet we need more and more of it. Something, besides the oil rig that sank, is bound to crash and burn very soon.  From the LA Times:

G-20 climate pact erases word ‘voluntary’ from efforts to cut oil-firm subsidies

International negotiators, under pressure from the Obama administration, agree to omit the term when describing efforts to cut production and consumption incentives. Summit also focuses on arriving at a consensus on the global economic crisis.

In a last-minute turn in global climate talks, international negotiators agreed over the weekend to adopt more ambitious plans than expected to trim government subsidies to oil [...]