Unsustainable? Well, there’s latex to dispose of, or worse still, population growth. But on the upside sex warms you up without needing to burn fossil fuels. It’s a renewable resource. And if it’s on offer for free this week in Copenhagen, it might just provide the positive energy to break some of the log-jams in the negotiations.

I’ve followed the build-up to the conference (beautifully dissected by Sam Kinght, writing in Prospect), with some amusement. Way back when I was writing The Wisdom of Whores, a friend from the World Bank was rolling his eyes at every UN agency’s willingness to hook itself to the HIV wagon. I quoted him thus:

““The UN institutions are professional beggars, and beggars go where the money is,” he said. “So you get “culture and AIDS”, “kids and AIDS”, “fish and AIDS”. I’m just waiting for “climate change and AIDS”.”

It wasn’t until months later that I saw the first headlines linking HIV to climate change. Just recently, there’s been a UNFPA report about it, which means it’s now official. As Rasna Warahp pointed out in Kenya’s The Nation, the real link between HIV and global warming will probably be that as more funding goes to the latter less will go to the former.

An aside, since I’m mentioning both development fashion and the World Bank: I am reliably informed that that venerable institution last week headed off a bid to have every loan reviewed for the effect that it has on trafficking of persons (which in the current climate is more or less equated with trafficking of women into the sex indutry). Just sometimes, common sense does prevail.

Thanks to Ron of greencollar for sharing the determination of the Danish with me.

Chatting with my friend Bert who works for the World Bank, I marvelled that almost every UN agency was on the AIDS bandwagon. Bert gave me a “Well duh!” look. “The UN institutions are professional beggars, and beggars go where the money is,” he said. “So you get “culture and AIDS”, “kids and AIDS”, “fish and AIDS”. I’m just waiting for “climate change and AIDS”.

Here’s the headline from The Australian:

Global warming set to fan HIV

The claim comes from Daniel Tarantola who, along with the posthumously sainted Jonathan Mann, turned HIV into a human rights issue, a development issue, a disease contracted by people who are poor and ill-educated, rather than a disease contracted by people who share needles or have unprotected sex with lots of partners.

“It was clear soon after the emergence of the HIV epidemic that discrimination, gender inequality and lack of access to essential services have made some populations more vulnerable than others,” said Prof Tarantola, of the University of NSW. “Climate change will trigger a chain of events which is likely to increase the stress on society and result in higher vulnerability to diseases including HIV.”

Australian scientist David Cooper, who’s normally rather sensible, played the “you, too, are at risk” card. “This would effect Australia too, because these infections could potentially spread. Just look at the horror that SARS and avian flu have caused.”

I’m hoping Cooper was misquoted. His comments rightly got the bloggosphere jeering. JammieWearingFool and Jimme at the Sundries Shack both made a more sensible diagnosis than the good doctors. This sort of hype keeps the cash rolling in. And of course people who work in HIV, number one on the donor fashion hit parade for so long, are worried that global warming is taking over as flavour-of-the-decade. What better way to protect your dosh than to conflate the two?

Of course other people can conflate the two as well; step forth the double denialists. To be honest, I can’t blame them. Even if there is a relationship between climate change, food security, nutrition and HIV, the “increased vulnerability” hype is beyond facile, it’s damaging. HIV is a big problem. We do need lots of money to deal with it. But we need to be dealing with it by spending that money on the people most likely to be exposed to the virus (as Australia currently does), not on making people who will never be at risk feel like the sky is falling.

Looking at some of the advice, I wonder if they can’t see the wood for the tree(hugger)s. Worrying about buying condoms in bulk to save on packaging waste seems to be overdoing it a bit. After all, if you’re not breeding, you are saving whole ponds worth of landfill nappies, not to mention all those air miles that will be saved in grandparent visits etc. I think non-breeders have done our bit for the planet: we can reserve the right to have sex in any colour we like.