Blair seeks U.S. support on global warming

GATESHEAD, England (AP) - Prime Minister Tony Blair said Saturday that securing U.S. support for tackling global warming was the crucial diplomatic challenge for the coming months.

Britain has made the battle against climate change a priority for its chairmanship of the G-8 group of industrial nations this year, and insists countries can cut the carbon emissions believed to contribute to global warming without affecting economic growth.

Washington, however, has rejected the internationally agreed Kyoto climate change accord on the grounds it would damage the U.S. economy. Kyoto comes into effect Feb. 16 with 136 countries signed up.

During a question and answer session at the governing Labour Party's conference in Gateshead, 270 miles north of London, Blair insisted it was important to reach an international consensus on the issue, though he has said it is futile to try to overcome hostility in the Bush administration and Congress to Kyoto.

"The most important thing is to try to re-establish, one a dialogue, and two a real direction of travel. At the moment there is Kyoto, which America is outside," Blair said. "I think the blunt reality is that, unless America comes back into some form of international consensus, it is very hard to make progress."

The prime minister is often mocked as Washington's poodle, and many in his party believe he follows U.S. policy without exerting any real influence. Gaining President Bush's support for Britain's G-8 goal of tackling climate change is regarded as an important test of whether Blair's voice is heard in the White House.

Blair has said that, given Washington's objectives, he wants to look beyond Kyoto's goals and encourage countries to boost research into green technology that would allow economic expansion without damaging the environment.

In London, several hundred protesters marched on the U.S. Embassy, demanding Bush sign Kyoto and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

"We are out here to save the planet," said Mark Hartung, one of about 350 people who braved cold and rain to demonstrate. "This march is a passionate plea for Bush to sign the Kyoto."

If you want to cut down on pollution and so-called "greenhouse" gas emmissions, the cheapest and fastest way to so do would be to pay to put out China's massive underground coal mine fires, which contribute as much as half of all air pollution world-wide.

But that's not what this "global warming" nonsense is all about; it's about shifting money from developed nations to the 3rd world by nefarious schemes such as trading industrial "pollution credits."

Underground coal fires called a 'catastrophe'

Saturday, February 15, 2003

By Michael Woods , Post-Gazette National Bureau

DENVER -- Nine men trapped in Pennsylvania's Quecreek Mine dramatized the danger of mine flooding last year, but a more common coal mine disaster is getting little attention, scientists said yesterday. It's the fire below.

Underground coal fires are relentlessly incinerating millions of tons of coal around the world.

The blazes spew out huge amounts of air pollutants, force residents to flee their homes, send toxic runoff flowing into waterways, and leave the land above as scarred as a battlefield.

"A global environmental catastrophe" is how geologist Glenn B. Stracher described the situation.

Stracher, of East Georgia College in Swainsboro, organized an international symposium on the topic at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

"This symposium is dedicated to disclosing the severity of the coal fires problem," Stracher said, noting that some of the fires have been burning for centuries with few people aware of the problem.

Concern and action is needed, he said, because of the environmental impact -- especially of mega-fires burning in India, China and elsewhere in Asia. One coal fire in northern China, for instance, is burning over an area more than 3,000 miles wide and almost 450 miles long.

"The direct and indirect economic losses from coal fires are huge," said Paul M. van Dijk, a Dutch scientist who is tracking the Chinese blazes via satellite.

He estimated that the Chinese fires alone consume 120 million tons of coal annually. That's almost as much as the annual coal production in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois combined.

The Chinese fires also make a big, hidden contribution to global warming through the greenhouse effect, scientists said. Each year they release 360 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, as much as all the cars and light trucks in the United States.

Soot from the fires in China, India and other Asian countries are a source of the "Asian Brown Haze." It's a 2-mile thick cloud of soot, acid droplets and other material that sometimes stretches across South Asia from Afghanistan to Sri Lanka.

The cloud causes acid rain that damages crops, cuts sunlight reaching the ground by 10 to 15 percent, and has been implicated in thousands of annual lung disease deaths.

Mine fires are frustratingly difficult and costly to extinguish, panelists said.

Weapons range from backfilling mine shafts to cutting off the oxygen supply with a new foam-like grout that's squirted into mine shafts like shaving cream and then expands to sniff out the fire.

Most are simply left alone to burn until they eventually exhaust their fuel supply.

Michael Woods can be reached at mwoods@nationalpress.com

http://www.post-gazette.com/healthscience/20030215coalenviro4p4.asp

A very large underground fire burns through large coal beds in Northern China. The fires consume up to 200 million tons of coal each year. This fire is quite a bit larger then the largest Pennsylvania fire (Centralia), releasing almost "as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as do all the cars in the United States" (Kittl, 1999). The Chinese havenÕt really paid much attention to the fire until recently. Now they monitor the fire with heat sensitive satellite photographs. Areas of subsidence have caused very large cracks in the surface and there are areas where one can observe the burning beds above them on the side of a cliff. The Chinese are now taking measures such as burying the coal with dirt and pouring a water-clay mix into surface cracks to cool the fire. They feel the only way to deal with these fires is to try to isolate them and let them burn out (Kittl, 1999).

http://www.fifedrum.org/rhinohug/Otherfires.html

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