An imagined analogy of decline in an exchange between George Monbiot (of The Guardian) and Franz Kafka, on the speech delivered at the Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen by the US energy secretary, Steven Chu, who shows how America’s unquestioning belief in the free market has held back technological innovation.

Kafka: Gregor awakes one morning in his family’s apartment to find himself inexplicably transformed overnight into a gigantic beetle. Gregor does not immediately recoil from his insect form, but instead chooses to lament his job by saying, “How am I going to get to work?” and the general misery of the rainy weather outside. Indeed, the narrative establishes the poor conditions as the cause of his bed-ridden state. Gregor works as a travelling salesman, and, as it is usual for travelling salesmen to move constantly from place to place, he is accustomed to waking up in unfamiliar surroundings and various circumstances.

Monbiot: On “US left behind in technological race to fight climate change”. The occasion was a speech by the US secretary of energy, Steven Chu. He is, of course, a Nobel physicist, brilliant, modest, likeable, a delightful contrast to the thugs employed by the previous administration. But his speech was, in the true sense of the word, pathetic: it moved me to pity.

Kafka: Because Gregor can’t provide financially any more, the other family members get jobs: Gregor’s father comes out of retirement to work at a bank, his mother sews fine underwear for a fashion house and his sister works in a shop and gets a position on a secretarial course. One day, when Gregor emerges from his room, his father chases him around the dining room table and pelts him with apples. One of the apples becomes embedded in his back, causing an infection.

Monbiot: Yesterday afternoon in Copenhagen – where the UN climate talks are entering their second week – Professor Chu unveiled what would have been a series of inspiring innovations, had he made this speech 15 years ago. Barely suppressing his excitement, he told us the US has discovered there is great potential for making fridges more efficient, and that the same principle could even be extended to lighting, heating and whole buildings. The Department of Energy is so thrilled by this discovery that it has launched a programme to retrofit homes in the US, on which it will spend $400m a year.

Kafka: Although he imprisons himself within his room voluntarily at first, his family later become the jailers, locking Gregor in from the outside, partly to hide him from their new lodgers. Devoid of human contact, Gregor alternates between concern for his family and anger at them for neglecting him.

Monbiot: It can’t all be blamed on George Bush: this technological backwardness pre-dates him. The real problem is the terror of all modern US governments of being seen to interfere in the free market. It’s ironic that the lack of effective regulation in the US has not ensured – as the free market fundamentalists prophesied – that the US came out in front, but that it has been left far behind. Just ask the car manufacturers. The truth, too uncomfortable to be discussed by US officials, is that government regulations are among the main drivers of technological innovation.

Kafka: The sister then determines with finality that the insect is no longer Gregor, since Gregor would have left them out of love and taken their burden away. Gregor returns to his room and collapses, finally succumbing to his wound and to his starvation. The point of view shifts as, upon discovery of his corpse, the family feels an enormous burden has been lifted from them, and start planning for the future again. The family discovers that they aren’t doing financially badly at all, especially since, following Gregor’s demise, they can take a smaller flat. The brief process of forgetting Gregor and shutting him from their lives is quickly completed. The final sentence echoes the first.

Not to be out-manoeuvred by its search rivals, Google has announced its very own “Real Time Search”, which will focus on social, mobile and real time. This is due to be rolled out over their search engines very soon.

For a quick peek into its usefulness, I took a look at the Copenhagen Climate Summit as an example.

In the twenty minutes or so I had real-time results updating, there was slurry of entries, including:
•    Bangladesh to seek 15 percent of any climate fund – Reuters
•    Copenhagen climate summit issues: money – Telegraph
•    US rock star sings to save shrunk Kashmiri glaciers – Xinhua
•    They opened climate talks in Copenhagen today and not a single polar bear showed up. If they’re not worrying, why should I? – StephenAtHome

But topping the bill was a story published on the Telegraph’s website – Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges.

Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen’s largest limousine company, said that during the “summit to save the world”, the total number of limos in Copenhagen had already broken the 1,200 barrier. She remarked: “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand…We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”

What’s even more alarming is that the number of electric and hybrid cars totals a paltry five: “We don’t have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it’s very Danish.” A very Danish sense of humour is it, to have organised a critical environmental event that prices out alternative energy? Anyway, the result is that the conference, including participants’ travel, will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, equivalent to the sum produced by a small European city over the same period.

Not to be discouraged in their efforts to avoid the next Armageddon, Denmark is expecting up to 140 private jets, which is so far above its capacity to cope,  the planes will have to be parked next door in Sweden. To soften the effect, perhaps the limos being driven in can give hitchhiking participants a ride?

Unlikely though, as in attendance will be 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists, 98 world leaders, Leonardo DiCaprio and Prince Charles, who are said to be already mulling over their sustainable scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges. The Great Unwashed (a term coined by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, describing the protagonists), will be tactfully located elsewhere carrying out a “funeral of the day” to mark their deep contempt for the Great Satan of all “heatist” concepts, economic growth.

According to the Telegraph, “Denmark has taken delivery of its first-ever water-cannon…plus sweeping new police powers. The authorities have been proudly showing us their new temporary prison, 360 cages in a disused brewery, housing 4,000 detainees.” Sounds promising.

To top it all, Ed Miliband, Britain’s Secretary of State at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, delivered a speech in which he said: “If Martin Luther King had come along and said ‘I have a nightmare’, people would not have followed him.” But no doubt they will follow those that declare: “I have a limousine (because my private jet’s parked in Sweden)”. At least the billowing hot air that will fire the conference’s central heating systems this week will be personally sustainable.

But I digress. This story is surely about real-time results and how useful this addition is to Google search. I have to say that Spiked Online’s Tim Brown, who once remarked Twitter was “…a seething mass of self-affirming emotional incontinence…” was mostly filtered out and the information was relevant to subject. And after pressing the pause-button to stem the flow and analyse the results, the entries came variously from the Twitter accounts of the major dailies.

Google’s “Real Time Search” does, after all, seem rather useful.

The Phoney War, also referred to as the Twilight War by Winston Churchill, was the description given to first few months in World War II following the German invasion of Poland, marked by a lack of military operations in Europe. The same could perhaps be said of News Corp in 2009.

Only last week we heard of an “exclusive deal” to list News Corp’s content on Microsoft’s Bing, but today a happy compromise has been suggested by the plaintiff. To many, dropping the company’s content from Google’s indexes was slated as a septuagenarian not understanding the concept behind the internet, while Hooray Henry newspaper chiefs curtsied in front of the great agitator-in-chief for taking on the titan of search.

Google, meanwhile, mused over the “kleptomania” furore and, according to a report in the NYT, said it, “provided news organizations’ websites with 100,000 clicks a minute, every one of which offers a business opportunity for the publishers to show ads, win loyal readers and sell subscriptions.”

As I have argued before, it is not easy for online news to make much revenue and an advertising model is perhaps the best anyone can ever achieve with regard to the established modus operandi of content provision and the monetisation of it.

In support of this and in a recession such as the one that has just descended on the world, vast volumes of online traffic do not necessarily translate into significant advertising revenue. Furthermore, news is a fickle business in that unless the entire industry pulls together in the same direction, people will read the news somewhere else — and that has been Mr Murdoch’s major gripe about the BBC.

So, with ad revenues slashed, Mr Murdoch’s great new architectural plan was unveiled to introduce subscriptions, which also flies in the face of how people use the web. This week Google seems to have softly entered the debate, looking at ways to appease Mr Murdoch and accommodate paid content.

As the NYT dismissively commented: “Critics of News Corp said last week that Google should just let Mr Murdoch walk away, and that he would be shooting himself in the foot by doing so. News is a commodity on the web, and the loss of one of many sources of it will make little difference to internet users…”

A Guardian article (you see how much I need the web for quotes and information that is published for free?), quoted Josh Cohen of Google News saying: “Media companies that want to erect paywalls around their online content still need to be visible on search engines. In fact, they have an even greater need for their content to be listed.”

He added that: “Google had achieved this by updating its First Click Free programme, so that publishers can limit Google News users to looking at no more than five pages of content a day without registering or subscribing.” The Financial Times is also using this service.

However, as always, there is a hitch: all a user needs to do is to go back to Google each time; and it is this “loophole” that Google is seeking to address so that it will limit you to five pages per day before registration, regardless of how you get to the website.

Arianna Huffington, whose site is largely known for aggregating content, said at a recent Federal Trade Commission workshop on “Journalism and the Internet Age”: “Murdoch is confusing aggregation with theft…” and added: “Aggregation is part of the web’s ‘DNA’ and that Murdoch plays both sides, noting that some of Murdoch’s own sites also aggregate or ’steal’ content.”

Others think the move is a significant initial victory for publishers, as Rory Cellan-Jones of BBC News said: “By playing hardball, [Murdoch] appears to have got Google to blink.” But as Mark Cuban, an HDNet exec, put it: “Platforms allow news sources, like Newscorp, to post breaking news and gain value from their brand. Google does not.  In other words, if I trust a newspaper, TV or any brand, I can follow it on Twitter and expect the news to come to me…Having to search for and find news in search engines is so 2008.”

So, the phoney war may just stay that way if the compromise is broad enough to placate Mr Murdoch. All said and done, the changes put forward by Google seem fair enough given the territory that’s at stake. But some observers have commented about the long-term sustainability of the model. One said: “The internet is open source at its core, is it not? So is content. Revenue models back to the drawing board…” Maybe, but the draughtsman’s contract has been gathering dust for over a decade now, still with no firm resolution in sight.