Excerpted from an Inter Press Service article:
NEW DELHI — The world's richest countries must drastically reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to mitigate climate change impacts, says the lead author of a United Nations report, due for release later this month, that focuses on impacts of global warming on the developing world.
To have a realistic chance of avoiding dangerous climate change, rich countries need to make cuts of at least 80 percent by 2050, said Kevin Watkins, an author of the UN's Human Development Report 2007, during a climate change workshop for Asian journalists in the Indian capital, last week…
Unfortunately for the mother ship, however, Watkins’s realistic chance has no realistic chance. George W. Bush refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol because rapidly developing countries such as China and India are exempt from its clean air requirements.
Fair is fair, Bush seemed to be saying — and most Americans seemed to agree, at least with this particular line of argument. Why give our competitors a get-out-of-jail card until they get to the point where they’re able to pump as much crap into the atmosphere as we do?
And this does indeed make sense to a species still genetically adapted to the tribal and territorial society of the hunter-gatherer. So I’m just talking to myself here, but let’s go ahead anyway.
This is not a zero-sum game, in which China and India win and we lose. Nobody breathes Chinese or Indian or American air. We all breathe the planet’s air. And if we cut down on greenhouse emissions but our economic competitors don’t, everybody’s air gets better. Or at least it gets worse more slowly.
Biologically, ecologically, medically, environmentally, climatologically, there are no losers. The human species wins. Even the polar bears do.
The war being waged by the major polluting nations is not against each other. It is against the planet and it's time we started losing it.
Nobody breathes Chinese or Indian or American air.
Uh, not quite true.
I don't like to self-promote, but this is an important post.
It shocked the hell out of me.
Posted by: SPIIDERWEB™ on November 8, 2007 9:23 PMI didn't mean to leave the impression that air pollution doesn't cross political boundaries. It does. But while air may have recently been in America or China, it isn't American air or Chinese air. It is constantly in transit. Heavy particulate from one country may fall or be washed out largely in another country, but the atmosphere as a whole is constantly mixing and mingling, so that greenhouse gases wind up having no country. And they don't, as far as I know, precipitate out as speedily as coal dust did when I was a kid in Pittsburgh. I imagine that carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gases may be chemically transformed over time, or diffuse or degrade in some way, or be somehow transformed by sunlight.
I agree with that.
Posted by: SPIIDERWEB™ on November 9, 2007 1:44 AMAnd now the plan is for building lots of new (soft) coal-burning power plants in West Virginia and Ohio and a new transmission line across Pennsylvania to deliver the power to New Jersey and New York. The power companies will have the power of eminent domain to install this huge power line wherever suits them.
So we'll get huge, disruptive, hideous transmission lines across any scenic area or metropolis---one direct line would bisect the Gettysburg Battlefield---with the corporations compensating landowners at whatever they think might be fair.
And we'll get even more coal-fired pollution, because those power plants will be located along our lines of prevailing winds. Supposedly, there is so much air pollution from the existing coal plants that if every car in the state was traded in for a horse and buggy, our air quality would still be poor.
And we won't get any of this extra power.
Posted by: Joyful Alternative on November 9, 2007 10:59 AMAnd of course horses are huge producers of methane gas too. The hunter gatherers had it all figured out and everything has been downhill since.
Posted by: PSymbol on November 9, 2007 12:42 PMHmm, maybe that's the problem with our air quality in Pennsylvania, PSymbol. If we made all those Amish polluters buy cars----
Posted by: Joyful Alternative on November 12, 2007 8:35 AM