Climate Change: Wasting our time again

For the past two weeks delegates were meeting at the UN climate change talks in Madrid. The meeting finally ended, having achieved... nothing. The IPCC has made it clear that we need to halve emissions by 2030 if we are to avoid making the planet uninhabitable, so countries needed to pledge deeper emissions cuts and back them up with policy. Instead, they wasted their time - and ours - bickering over carbon trading. Faced with the biggest crisis humanity has ever seen, they were worried about how to financialise it so the rich people who caused it can make even more money off it (and preferably while doing nothing to reduce pollution, or even polluting more). Oh, and how they could avoid legal liability for the damage they have already caused. Meanwhile, they threw out civil society representatives, while letting polluter lobbyists roam the halls. And then they wonder why we have no faith in them, and why we see them as a corrupt, out-of-touch elite fiddling while the planet burns.