The G8 will be meeting in Germany next week for its annual summit, with climate change expected to dominate the agenda as Europe pushes for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. The US has been fighting tooth and nail to block any progress, however George Bush has suddenly announced that the US will lead a series of seperate talks bringing together the world's 15 worst carbon polluters with the aim of agreeing a long-term goal for reducing greenhouse gases by the end of 2008.
This sounds good, but the message is in the fine print: despite bringing major emitters together to negotiate, the US rejects any national targets, or any qualitiative goal which could help to define them, or any move towards a global emissions trading system. In other words, they're proposing a "climate change treaty" which is worse than those already negotiated and which, by definition, cannot achieve any meaningful progress.
(But then, preventing meaningful progress is after all the point. Gotta keep those oil and coal profits rolling in...)
Like the AP6 (also coincidentally announced at a G8 summit which showed too much chance of moving forward on climate change), this is simply an attempt to undermine negotiations and allow the US to buy themselves a few more years in which they can pollute freely. And they should not be allowed to get away with it. If the US is not going to participate meaningfully in negotiations, they should be excluded, and the rest of the world should press on without them. Then, when we have a deal, we should use border taxes to force them to sign up for it. But one thing is clear: the charade in which the US uses negotiations not to reach a deal, but to prevent other countries from reaching one cannot be allowed to continue.
You'd think after six and a half years of this bloke, the Dems would have learned better. (More than 10 years, actually, if you count from the Republican capture of Congress.)
ReplyDeleteOops
ReplyDeleteU.S. carbon dioxide emissions dropped slightly last year even as the economy grew, according to an initial estimate released yesterday by the Energy Information Administration.
The 1.3 percent drop in CO{-2} emissions marks the first time that U.S. pollution linked to global warming has declined in absolute terms since 2001 and the first time it has gone down since 1990 while the economy was thriving. Carbon dioxide emissions declined in both 2001 and 1991, in large part because of economic slowdowns during those years.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/23/AR2007052301510.html