Andrew Dickens Afternoons

Who would have thought that on the first day I’d be waking up thinking, “Where’s Leighton Smith when you need him”.I thought of him as I heard the news that there was a breakthrough in the COP 24 talks on climate change in Poland. Leighton would have railed at the so-called breakthrough and continued his rearguard action to remove man-made climate change from the world’s consciousness and it would have been very entertaining indeed.But I come at this in another way. The so-called breakthrough in Poland is actually proof that the whole process is essentially powerless and is more about posturing than anything else.The language around the meeting was all about providing a rulebook for the control of emissions with the hope that controlling emissions may reduce the temperature on Earth over the next few decades. Yet by my reading, there are no rules here. All there is is a ruler.Rules are not rules unless they have consequences. Rules are not rules unless if they’re broken there are penalties. And the weakness o