Fidel Castro unites with Barack Obama in the fight against climate change

Former Cuban leader praises US president for his courage and bravery — words that send a chill through the White House corridors
Fidel Castro is famous for his backside-numbing, four-hour speeches but the irrepressible Cuban leader may now have found a new subject to wax lyrical about — climate change. In a translated article on Digital Granma Internacional the bearded revolutionary dissects President Obama's speech on climate change at the UN in New York this week.
Obama had offered rousing rhetoric but no specifics — much to the disappointment of environmentalists. "We understand the gravity of the climate threat. We are determined to act," he said. "We must seize the opportunity to make Copenhagen a significant step forward in the global fight against climate change."
Castro's take is infused a familiar anti-US tone, but one wonders whether Obama and his advisers would have preferred that the Cuban leader had not finished by praising Obama's "courage" and "brave gesture". That's usually not the way to build support at home for a controversial policy:
The problem now is that everything he is affirming is in contradiction with what the United States has been doing for 150 years, and particularly since, toward the end of world war two, it imposed the Bretton Woods agreement on the world and became the master of the world economy.
The hundreds of military bases installed in dozens of countries on all the continents, its aircraft carriers and its naval fleets, its thousands of nuclear weapons, its wars of conquest, its military-industrial complex and its arms trading are incompatible with the idea of the survival of our species.
Consumer societies and the squandering of material resources are likewise incompatible with ideas of economic growth and a clean planet. The unlimited waste of non-renewable natural resources, particularly oil and gas, accumulated over hundreds of millions of years and which will be exhausted within barely two centuries at the current rate of consumption, have been the fundamental causes of climate change. Even if contaminating gases are reduced in the industrialized countries, which would be praiseworthy, it is no less certain that 5.200 billion inhabitants of the planet Earth are living in countries still to be developed to a greater or lesser degree, which are going to be demanding a huge consumption of coal, oil, natural gas and other non-renewable resources which, in line with consumer patterns created by the capitalist economy, are incompatible with the objective of saving the human species.
It would not be fair to blame the serious Obama of the aforementioned enigma for what has occurred to date, but it is far less just that the other Obama should make us believe that humanity can be preserved under the regulations currently prevailing in the world economy.
The president of the United States admitted that the developed nations have caused much of the damage and must assume responsibility for that. It was doubtless a brave gesture.
It would also be just to recognize that no other president of the United States would have had the courage to say what he said.