US remains major obstacle to reducing carbon emissions
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Posted on November 16, 2006
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Greenhouse gas emissions, Ecological hope, Consumer culture, Fossil fuel dependency, Environmental disasters, Earth spirituality
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
[Note: I will be on the road over the next week. I will not be able to post tomorrow, but will do so as I am able while away from my usual desk. Thanks for visiting!! and for caring about our Earth.]
“This is not a fight against nature. It is a battle against shortsighted egoism.”
Yes, and we would add, against the shortsighted bottom line and the greed of corporations.
The above was said by Moritz Leuenberger, president of Switzerland, at the talks on global warming/climate change in Nairobi, Kenya, which we have been posting about this month. The talks bring 165 nations together to try to negotiate a regimen to reduce greenhouse gas emissions once the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. The US is not part of Kyoto, and the Bush administration has made it clear that it will not be part of any other regimen that includes international mandatory agreements.
Folks, this has got to change.
The quote above comes from today’s NY Times. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan spoke to the conference yesterday, and his words were stark, a challenge to the global warming naysayers and resisters who are prepared to see more chaos and suffering rather than have their economic power and wealth diminished by even the slightest amount — which is all it would take. And then there are the ideologues who insist the US always go-it-alone, and the rest of the world be damned — and it is being damned right now to a terrible future.
“The impact of climate change will fall disproportionately on the world’s poorest countries, many of them here in Africa. Poor people already live on the front lines of pollution, disaster and the degradation of resources and land. For them adaptation is a matter of sheer survival.”
Hey, but for coporations, is it about the profit margin.
Yes, this has got to change.
Annan says the problem is “a frightening lack of leadership.” We agree. “US rejects Anna plea to cut greenhouse gases,” declares another Washington Post headline.
The US and Australia are the two industrialized countries that remain outside Kyoto. Keep in mind that the Kyoto Protocol’s targets for gas emissions are woeful considering the reality. Something far stronger and more urgent is needed, and yet the US, the world’s biggest polluter, biggest belcher of the carbon emissions that are altering the atmosphere of our planeet, won’t even go that far.
Sadly, negotiators will leave Kyoto with a pretty weak set of proposed actions. And many admit that nothing can be done until the US has new leadership in the White House in 2009. This is shameful, but there you are.
Annan said that global warming skeptics are ”out of step, out of arguments and out of time“. That, of course, would be us.
Some are proposing a carbon tax, which we support. It would tax polluters, hopefully a lot, and use the funds to help with mitigation and adaptation. This includes relocating populations threatened by the inundation of the seas, rising waters, drought, the collapse of agriculture, and other impacts already being experienced.
But many of these threatened peoples and nations say that adaptation measures must not be allowed to put off the necessity of drastic reductions of carbon emissions — to keep things from getting much worse than what we already know — a rise in global temperature of 3.5 C this century, and possibly a catastrophic 5-8 degrees if we continue as we are.
Democrats have said they are prepared to take strong action on greenhouse gas emissions, and it is good news that Sen. Barbara Boxer will chair the Senate committee on the environment. All of us need to get busy approaching the new Congress between now and January to tell them what we expect of them — swift and urgent action.
Because, folks, this has got to change.
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