Climate Change: is it all over red rover for the world as we know it?

On the 15th of November 2009 it was confirmed that world leaders at the latest APEC conference had watered down their pre-COP15 statement on climate change goals. The APEC mention of a target figure for lower global greenhouse gas emissions had disappeared up the vested interests' overfed collective posterior about the same time that the draft document prepared for ratification at the Copenhagen meeting had been ripped to shreds.
This followed hot on the heels of a domestic announcement that the Rudd Government was watering down its own national climate change response, with an eviscerated Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme being shaped in negotiation between federal government and what are essentially climate change deniers acting on behalf of big greenhouse gas polluting industries.
It is distressingly apparent that this December the national governments gathered together are not about to bring forth a legally binding global agreement to tackle climate change - even though scientists have been bluntly warning about global warming since the early 1970s and we've literally run out of time to um and ah.
An enforceable global agreement will probably never happen, period.
Instead what the world's populations are being offered is the ephemeral promise of a joint political pledge which can be torn in two at the next round of home-grown elections.
It seems that the largest national economies have reached their own domestic political tipping points and are walking away from the rest of the world with a shrug of the shoulders and a "She'll be right Jack" attitude.
So where does that leave the ordinary Aussie man, woman and child?
It leaves every single one up sh*t creek without a paddle. No realistic options, no escape. Part of an unofficial third world.
Because when things start to go pear-shaped with water, food, electricity, fuels and goods becoming ridiculously expensive due to resource scarcity it will be the ordinary person who will be called upon to bear a disproportionate level of the financial burden and meekly receive a lesser allocation of these resources.
Later, when Australia and the rest of the world moves from scarcity to actual absence of certain vital reserves it will be ordinary people again who will be expected to go hungry, thirsty and place themselves at the mercy local weather extremes.
These same ordinary people will also be expected to pick up their belongings and move away from the coast with little or no help to relocate, for those with money and political pull will be more interested in smoothing their own passage in the face of an ongoing global crisis.
It won't help that you may own your own home - it's likely to be virtually worthless in 30 years time if you live in the immediate coastal zone or perhaps even within seven kilometres of the coast if severe destructive storms are frequent enough.
It won't matter that you were expecting your superannuation fund to see you through retirement - most of the infrastructure and shares it invested in will have gone on the incoming tide, been blown away by endless drought or disappeared into the maw of institutional investor and stock market panic.
No-one will care if you were a good and loyal employee or a lazy worker, a responsible citizen or a couldn't care less grasshopper - by then it's more than possible that your government will be flat broke and unable to offer any form of social safety net.
The politicians and power brokers of today don't really give a damn what happens to you because you're not one of the privileged clique.
It would cost too much in financial and political effort to actually do something effective about the catastrophic climate change bearing inexorably down on us all and these silvertails might actually have to momentarily pause in their obsessive drive for political power and influence or halt for a few financial cycles their current obscene wealth accumulation.
Dragging them out of their beds and lynching them is too good for our so-called world leaders and their multinational backers.
But in Australia the local sub-species of effin' sods obviously feel smugly safe from threat because Aussies don't resort to that sort of mob violence, instead we wait meekly for the pubs and the polls to open.
However, the world will change dramatically over the next fifty years or so and perhaps the then oh so elderly Rudd and Turnbull (flanked by their withered front benchers in bath chairs) shouldn't expect to sleep as peacefully in their retirement beds as their predecessors.