Quadrant Online (Australia)
If Utopia last century was populated by Soviet Man, he has been
superseded this century by Green Person, but with eerily similar
yearnings – this time for a ‘sustainable’ world free of ‘inequity’.
Paradoxically, the contraction-and-convergence concept’s surprise creator, Aubrey Meyer,
is neither eco-Marxist nor career UN climate bureaucrat. He is a
musician (viola player) by training and former member of the UK Green
Party. Now a climate campaigner and composer, he co-founded the Global Commons Institute in 1990.
According to Mr Meyer’s site, his first public “Contraction & Convergence” statement was published in The Guardian
on June 18, 1991, with 250 signatories, including 50 UK
Parliamentarians. The following year, he presented what appears to have
been an influential paper on it — ‘The Unequal Use of the Global
Commons’ — to a Policy Working Group at the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change.
Surely the developing world did not put the $$$-cart before the
dangerous climate-horse? Yet Mr Meyer’s concept appeared years before
any UNFCCC appeals to “settled” (climate) science; and before
two-decades of confirmation bias led us to where we are today. But that
is another story."
Its accurate to observe (as above) that music is not an ideology.
ReplyDeleteC&C is now embedded in CBAT: - http://cbat.info/#domain-1/feedback
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