Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 01/30/2008 2:30:28 PM PST by NormsRevenge
UNITED NATIONS - Global warming could cost the world up to $20 trillion over two decades for cleaner energy sources and do the most harm to people who can least afford to adapt, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warns in a new report.
Ban's report provides an overview of U.N. climate efforts to help the 192-nation General Assembly prepare for a key two-day climate debate in mid-February. That debate is intended to shape overall U.N. policy on climate change, including how nations can adapt to a warmer world and ways of supporting the U.N.-led negotiations toward a new climate treaty by 2009, U.N. officials said Wednesday.
The treaty, replacing the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012, could shape the course of climate change for decades to come. The Kyoto pact requires 37 industrial nations to reduce greenhouse gases by a relatively modest 5 percent on average.
Much of the focus has been on the United States, the only major industrial nation to reject the treaty, and on fast-developing nations such as China and India. Many are looking to next year, when a new U.S. president takes the White House. The leading contenders in both political parties favor doing more than the voluntary approaches and call for new technologies that President Bush espouses.
In his 52-page report, Ban says that global investments of $15 trillion to $20 trillion over the next 20 to 25 years may be required "to place the world on a markedly different and sustainable energy trajectory." Today, the global energy industry spends about $300 billion a year in new plants, transmission networks and other new investment, according to U.N. figures.
Srgjan Kerim, a Macedonian diplomat and economics professor who is president of the U.N. General Assembly, told The Associated Press that cutting greenhouse gases alone will not be enough to pull island nations, sub-Saharan Africa and other particularly vulnerable parts of the world back from the brink of irreversible harm.
"Cutting emissions is a very important dimension, but that's not enough for this equation," Kerim said in an interview this week. "Inventing new technologies, renewable energies, investing more in research and development, is also a very viable way and remedy for resolving the problem."
In December, under the auspices of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the 186 nations that attended a climate meeting in Bali, Indonesia, agreed on a "Bali Roadmap" of principles to craft a successor to the Kyoto treaty.
Last year, a Noble Prize-winning U.N. network of climate and other scientists warned of rising seas, droughts, severe weather and other dire consequences without sharp cutbacks in emissions of the industrial, transportation and agricultural gases blamed for warming.
That network, called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, advised that emissions should be reduced by 25 percent to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.
"Climate change and its implications is a broader process, more profound than negotiations among member states," Kerim said. "So our aim, our goal is to support that process, not to replace it."
Kerim said he wants to encourage partnerships between businesses and governments, and that he would refrain from encouraging nations to assign blame — and added responsibility — to the United States and other rich nations for their historical pollution.
"To approach the issue must be a forward looking way," he said. "We have to now try to find a way out. And to find a way out, you don't look in the rear mirror which shows you the back of your car."
British billionaire Richard Branson, who has decided to invest heavily in "biofuels" along with his Virgin brand of several hundred companies, will be a special guest at the assembly meeting, Kerim said.
"He was one of the first who reacted and who said that he's prepared to finance projects for clean energies and technologies," Kerim said.
Like Ban, who told the AP in December that his No. 1 priority is persuading the world to agree to new controls on global warming gases before the end of 2009, Kerim calls the challenges of climate change "my flagship topic."
In his report, Ban warned that global warming would probably affect women more than men. "The challenge of climate change is unlikely to be gender-neutral, as it increases the risk to the most vulnerable and less empowered social groups," he said.
Annie Petsonk, a lawyer for the advocacy group Environmental Defense, said global warming will most affect poor people and minorities, because the wealthy can spend more to adapt. "Women in poorer communities are going to face greater challenges protecting their children from the spread of diseases, polluted water, water shortages and so on," she said.
We are on the road to making binding agreements. One reasons I will not support ANY of the buttmunches that are still running for the nomination.
a trillion a year.. wow
All the wealth of the world is not enough to effect a permanent change in the climate of planet earth, up or down.
The foolish hubris of so many so-called "scientists" is really amazing.
While Global Warming may cost $20 trillion if implemented, there is no money for this program since the USA has borrowed all the money on the planet.
McCain = Hillary = Obama on this issue. All will sell the US out to pay lots of money for a non-cure to a non-problem.
...and here I sit in S. California with the heat on trying to warm up the house at 2:36 PM PST so I can type on the keyboard, and I read some crap about Trillions of dollars for coping with Global Warming.
Gimme a break!
“Women in poorer communities are going to face greater challenges protecting their children from the spread of diseases, polluted water, water shortages and so on,”
Women...Poor....Children.....check.
NEWSWEEK: AL GORE NOW WORTH MORE THAN $100 MILLION
[Since 2000, according to published reports, the former veep has transformed himself from a public servant with around $1 million in the bank to a sparkling private consultant with a net worth estimated to be north of $100 million. He’s a senior adviser to Google, a board member at Apple and now a newly minted general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the Silicon Valley venture-capital firm that made billions investing early in Netscape, Amazon and Google. . .If Gore’s profit-sharing deal is anything like the firm’s other 23 partners, he’s also in line to collect tens of millions of dollars a year. That’s because partners carve up 30 percent of the profits if and when the alternative-energy start-ups that KP supports go public or are sold. . .]
Mid-February; they’re just begging for a snow storm.
Hear, hear!
Not ONE of the remaining goofballs would do anything to resist this Carbon Cap & Trade-promoting sham. You can bet that the Democrat candidate would immediately create a Cabinet Level position of "Secretary of Environment and Global Climate Control", or some such lunacy.
This whole election year is becoming a very sad story, indeed.
"UN: Climate Change Fraud will cost US Taxpayers 20+ Trillion."
So, after the world economy has crashed and we all wallow in a kind of politically correct Luddite miasmal misery, there will be the start of some very heated descent, and the mobs with the torches and pitchforks won't be out to dig compost for organic gardening, I can tell you!
Would that also include the damage done by do-gooders who killed the use and production of DDT, leading to an estimated 40 - 80 million dead from mosquito-borne diseases??
The horse ca-ca associated with "GW" stands to do at least as much damage as the ban on DDT and will be manifest through job losses due to industry shutdowns, less food availability, greater poverty, more disease, less wealth, etc., etc., etc.!!!! All because the MoveOn.org leftists of the world want more power and could care less how many bodies they have to climb over to get it!!! Kyoto is/has been a disaster for those nations that signed onto it and, despite their aggressive claims that they will meet the Kyoto accords in the future, the past record says no! The Kyoto accords requirements are so draconian that most civilized/industrialized nations can't/won't meet the Kyoto requirements for greenhouse gas emissions in the foreseeable future
An important POGW ping!
Oh but the NBA and the United Methodist Church is supporting NothingButNet.net to save Africans, $10 per person, by putting a net over each bed. The geek from the NBA said it’s super simple! Problem solved! /s
Click on POGW graphic for full GW rundown
New!!: Dr. John Ray's
GREENIE WATCH
Ping me if you find one I've missed.
$20 Trillion invested for nothing in return.
The climate will still do what it wants to do.
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