So, I woke up today and am trying to figure out what to expect from the 13th Conference of the Parties in Bali. (Conference of Parties to what? Um, the 1992 Rio “Earth Summit” agreement on climate change. The “Kyoto Protocol” was an amendment to that agreement. The whole mess is administered by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC.)

One bit of good news is the appearance of the “Bali Communique” — a document signed by 150 companies. These companies say they want legally binding targets, targets set by science, and emphasis on industrialized companies lowering their emissions. I agree with all of those things, and we’ll try to sort out in the weeks to come how much of this is greenwashing and, related, how much is simply a license to keep moving industrial production to the non-completely-industrialized world.

Another bit of good news is that drought-parched Australia has figured out that it better participate in this whole dance. The new Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, got Kyoto signed right away. So who hasn’t signed now? One guess. India and China signed Kyoto without any responsibilities, however, keep in mind — they’re not part of “Annex I”, in Kyoto-speak.
That all ultimately doesn’t matter, because Kyoto itself is both flawed and puny. The aim is to create an agreement on a “process” for or “road map” to an agreement, itself to be finalized in 2009. The work product will be a PROCESS, people. Be afraid, be very afraid.

There’s a smack-down in the world of Word of the Year. Since 1991, it was the American Dialect Society which handed out the most repeated “Word of the Year” (as well as other variations, such as “Most Useful” or “Most Outrageous”). But the New Oxford American Dictionary is now in on the act, and the word this year is… ‘locavore’.

No, this isn’t a word for how Godzilla eats locations like herbivores eat herbs and omnivores eat dilemmas. Locavores eat close to home — they eat locally-grown produce, join local CSAs, visit farmer’s markets, garden, and may actually know the farmers who made their food.

I really like this choice. Why do I mention it in a global warming blog posting? Because, in my view, eating close to home has an ideal dual relationship to global warming:

• It is the one best thing you can do to lower your carbon footprint
• It is one essential thing you’ll need to learn how to do if or when gloabl warming gets out of control

The amount of fossil fuel involved in eating mass-produced food (fertilizer, farming, packaging, and transport) is ridiculous, and the entire enterprise rests upon a system which does not price the true cost of burning carbon into its price. Fair enough — to avoid that system, you eat local — minimize the packaging, minimize the fertilizer, minimize the transport.

Let’s say that the true cost of carbon gets priced into the food. What will happen? Food prices will go waaaaay up. Or, let’s say global warming gets out of control, entire areas of the world become unsuitable for wide scale farming, and food gets scarcer. What then? Better learn what grows close to you, and better learn who knows how to do it!

That’s the double-win of being a locavore.