10 Dec Fight Climate Change, Not Wars

December 10th, 2009
By Naomi Klein

In the U.S. plenty of bloggers have pointed to the irony of Barack Obama collecting the Peace Prize while he launches a major escalation of the war in Afghanistan.

Here in Copenhagen, the Nobel — which was awarded in part because of Obama’s reengagement with the climate change negotiations — carries a special set of ironies.

The figure U.S. negotiators are floating for how much Washington will contribute to an international climate change fund is a paltry $1.4-billion.Meanwhile, the cost of the “surge” in Afghanistan is estimated at $30-40-billion. Yesterday I interviewed Kumi Naidoo, the new director of Greenpeace International, and he made this point forcefully: