Saturday 3 June 2017

Paris Accord, POTUS & Horse Latitudes



Humanity is today facing one of its biggest threats - Climate Change.  It can be viewed as a polymorphic organism that props up in different forms at different locations. Beneath water, it manifests as bleach, at the surface, it expresses as elevated temperature, level rise, etc. On land, it is shortened winter, droughts or deluges. Climate change is neither the first, nor will be the last test for humanity. On many occasions during the course of human evolution, humanity found itself pushed to the wall. At every instance, we devised new ways to scale seemingly insurmountable walls. However, today we acknowledge climate change as a contemporary challenge and have agreed to pool wisdom, knowledge, information available at our individual and collective disposal and strive to come out with flying colours. A formal accord towards synchronized efforts to overcome the challenge was agreed to at Paris in late 2016. It was hailed across the world as, unprecedented.      
      
The Paris accord was a timely collective step in the right direction. Finer interpretation of supporting technical documents reveals that we have understood the challenge to a reasonable depth. Climate change is different from other challenges faced by humanity. Its dual form; of being both creeping and abrupt, necessitates us to redraw new and dynamic strategies to counter it. Prioritizing wealth (over money) was identified as the central, non-negotiable principle of the Paris accord.

As for almost all global scale efforts, the United States of America (USA) - militarily the most powerful nation on Earth – was looked upon as the leader and POTUS; the captain to steer the accord to its logical objectives. I do not view POTUS as an individual. It is one of the most powerful offices’ on the planet. Common man in any nation on this planet holds POTUS in high esteem. Hence the conventional ideal of chivalry viz. morality tied to honour, service, and respect was expected from it.

As the captain of the ship (Earth), POTUS was expected to go down with it. However, with the unilateral declaration to withdraw from the Paris accord, POTUS has behaved as a captain who has abandoned his ship at time of emergency. The only measurable consequence of this withdrawal is the steep plummet of the image of POTUS. The 21st century world is different. It has many nations with towering leaders, who are competent to steer the ship successfully forward. 

As said in the Gita; Whatever Happens, Happen For Good.

Looking back, after a couple of years, we may claim that in mid-2017, our ship crossed the Horse Latitudes!

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