President Obama has stated that part of addressing this financial crisis is making all parties realize that "business as usual" is finished. This message was largely directed to Wall Street bankers who scooped up billions of $$$ in the "good" times that brought about this crisis, and then expected the gravy train to continue even now in the depths of the abyss.
But the term business as usual is not new to those concerned about climate change. As a matter of fact it has been used by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) for the last 20 years. They even coined the acronym BAU to indicate what can not be sustained by the planet's climate system to insure long-term stability.
Unfortunately we are still following business as usual here in the U.S. Not only have we not committed to capping CO2, we are ignoring great warnings that change is happening even faster than was previously believed possible. A recent conference in Copenhagen saw the esteemed economist Lord Nicholas Stern revise his 2006 "Stern Review" projections on the cost of not addressing climate change. Guess what? They're up by 50%! This made huge headlines in Europe and around the world.
In the U.S., however there was hardly a mention of it.
Sounds like BAU to me.
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