Federico Pistono

I'm getting a little confused. Just when you thought things would eventually get better for the COP15, there it comes. First Obama warns that there will be no deal: we're out of time. Then John Prescott encourages us explaining why the Copenhagen conference will be 10 times more difficult than Kyoto, finally the consideration that the US is a dead weight on Copenhagen talks, pulling down ambition ever lower. All of this just in the last three days.

Magic of Life by victor_nuno (CC-BY-NC).

Now, we come to know that the US and China, the world's two biggest polluters with over 40% of the emissions, today said they aimed to set targets for easing greenhouse gas emissions next month, potentially breathing new life into the flagging Copenhagen climate negotiations ¹.

This continuous ping pong, while expected, is making me very suspicious, as well as frustrated. But I can understand that their position is not as easy one. On my side, it's all pretty simple. Identify the problem, look for solutions, apply them. Unfortunately, when you are in politics, things are far from being this easy. Obama and Jintao had a lot to talk about: Tibet, human rights in China, internet censorship, trade, Iran. And then, of course, climate change.

Being a politician, especially at this level, is very much like being a juggler: you need to keep things in balance, you have may balls in your hands, each of which plays a role in the success of the performance, and if you don't pay enough attention, they will fall to the ground. However, there is a catch: the balls are connected with a wire. That means, if you let one down, they all fall.

We all play a role in this big game: the outraged blogger, the "evil corporation", the corrupt politician, the environmental activist... but in the end, we are all people. We all have the same final goal: preserve life on this planet, especially ours. If you have any notion of biology, however, you would know that species are inter-connected, and that we can't live by ourselves. In the face of the obliteration of the species, economic growth, profit, class, the old appeals to racial, sexual and religious chauvinism, to rabid nationalist fervor, seem utterly irrelevant. Some of us just seem to forget what's most important.

p.s. This article was crossposted on the TH!NK ABOUT IT - Climate Change blogging competition.

I would like to draw your attention to the fate of the approximately 100 journalists, cyber-dissidents and press freedom activists who are imprisoned in your country. I think it is vital that they should be released prior to the holding of the Olympic Games in the summer of 2008.

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What happens when a Chinese website goes phishing Google's gMail? Well, if you happen to have Internet Explorer (or other closed-source browsers) and you're not familiar with phishing techniques then you'll probably accidentally send your precious gMail password to that nasty Chinese website.

On the other hand, if you have Firefox, something different will happen, I received a stupid email a few hours ago. According to this concorso.lampa@gmail.com (I figured there's many different version of this in many languages) I won a Google lava lamp. Unfortunately, instead of going to google server, it redirects to menorca.cn, which I figured it to be Chinese crap.

In just a few hours, the Firefox community reported the website as possible phishing, providing us with an alert message.

Not a bad response time, not bad at all. Take that, nasty Chinese website!
（｀ハ´）