To the Third World, the United States stands out as the nation resolutely blocking "any hope of stopping run away climate catastrophe.”
“By the end of the most recent round of climate talks in Bangkok (August 30 to September 5), there was no movement from developed countries to increase the level of their ambition with regard to emissions reductions – the low pledges, subject to many conditions, made in Durban, South Africa, last December remain unchanged,” wrote Chee Yoke Ling and Hilary Chiew of the Third World Network (TWN) in an article for the South-North Development Monitor (SUNS) web site.
“Even as scientific evidence mounts on worsening climate change, developed countries are not willing to meet their legal obligations to make deep greenhouse gases cuts under the Kyoto Protocol,” they concluded.
Representatives of civil society organizations reacted angrily at the end of the UN climate talks in Bangkok, and said it is apparent that the 8th annual session of the Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol to be held in the Qatari capital Doha will not approve further action on climate change this decade.
“The United States government is opposed to a top-down structure under the Kyoto Protocol’s second commitment period,” said Meena Raman, legal advisor to the TWN. “The United States wants a voluntary pledging system to cut emissions that is not based on science nor based on equity.”
She added: “The United States and its allies want the UN to ‘be silent’ on issues where they haven’t yet reached agreement. To be clear that means they want the UN to be silent on solving climate change. The US is taking a wrecking ball to the climate convention and any hope of stopping run away climate catastrophe.”
The Third World is fingering the U.S. and its allies (that'd be us) with responsibility for the climate change impacts that have already begun to arrive and will ramp up substantially over the next few decades. By tagging us with responsibility for their misfortune they're setting up at the very least a moral claim for redress, compensation.
It is at least possible, perhaps even inevitable, that the climate change grievance will become a major source of tension and conflict between the developed world (us) and the Third World. This grievance will not only destabilize countries, perhaps entire regions, but will fuel 'poor man's warfare', that is to say terrorism, the scale of which could be considerable.
2 comments:
So what you end up with is a situation where most of the world has penalized itself with a tax - payable to the UN - which gives it a trade disadvantage compared to scoffers. This works out the same as self imposed sanctions plus raises a levy for the bureaucracy. Why would people falsify an ability to predict the future again LOL as if energy policy was ever an aboveboard scheme. As an example of its convolutions look up the NPT TRAP. And recall Japan initiated WW II partly because of trade sanctions. Not that things have not been interesting this week with China and Russia bypassing the stranglehold the US has had over international economics. But it`s not merely the likes of Iraq or Libya this time...or even Iran.
It will be a frosty Friday in Hell indeed before an advantage like this will be tossed away because of a scare promoted on exaggerating both the scale of warming promoted by co2 and any understanding we have of climate processes as a system or aggregate.
War by other means tends towards weird.
"Most of the world"? Most, really? If exported environmental costs are calculated - such as pumping massive amounts of greenhouse gases into our 'shared' atmosphere - your trade disadvantage argument turns nonsensical. We know that there is no way ahead that doesn't entail pricing nature whether that is access to the atmosphere or consumption of freshwater and energy.
Western economies have been based and have thrived on a fiction of free resources. Why? Does the atmosphere belong more to you, Opit, than it does to a Sahel herder? On what do you base your priority over his? Yet you would ruin his atmosphere as well as your own and slander him as a "scoffer."
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