Posted on 12/07/2005 6:51:03 AM PST by ncountylee
Montreal (CNSNews.com) - Environmental groups attending the United Nations Climate Change Conference have demanded that the U.S. and the other industrialized nations pay a "climate debt" to the poor nations for contributing to catastrophic, human-caused "global warming."
"Let's face it, [the developing countries] are not responsible for the problem and yet they are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change," said Catherine Pearce, international climate campaigner for Friends of the Earth International (FOEI). Pearce spoke with Cybercast News Service at the 11th annual U.N. Climate Change Conference in Montreal.
"It is total over-exploitation by the North[ern Hemisphere] and the North is just using up the natural resources of the world for its own gain and its own benefit," Pearce said. She noted that "people are being thrown off their land (in developing countries) to grow mono-culture plantations" that are used by industrialized countries.
"What Northern countries can be doing is to repay some of [their climate] debt in terms of resources, financing, [and] technology to countries of the South[ern Hemisphere]," she added.
Friends of the Earth International sponsored a panel discussion on "climate justice" at the U.N. conference on Monday.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnsnews.com ...
"Let's face it, [the developing countries] are not responsible for the problem"
india? china? any turd world nation? only developed countries are looking at and are concerned about emissions. Only they have the infrastructure which provides for a EPA or support monitoring groups.
oooh man..... I hate the smell of methane. these guys gotta rethink their criticisms.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie.Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
America is 1/2 Trillion in the red. I think we can be considered poor.
(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie.Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")
According to another post today from Earthfiles on global warming, the weather we're having now on Earth is part of a 10,000 year cycle that alternates with 100,000 year ice ages.
I assume that the now-tropical poor nations were beneficairies of the warming trend before us. So they owe us for having to creep around in caves wearing skins we had to fight to obtain while they were having a relaxing day at the beach on all that sand..
Friends of the Earth hasn't understood a word since Adam Smith's Wealth was published.
In other news, the poor countries owe "lackadaisical debt" to rich nations for forcing them to provide the technology, products and wealth for the world while they sit back and complain it not enough.
Gee, you mean the hundreds of billions of dollars in aid we send today is not enough????
"Second, the US has led the world in the development and application of anti-pollution devices and technologies. Think I read somewhere that, on our own, we're doing more to curb pollution and the creation of greenhouse gasses than most of the signatories to Kyoto."
BINGO! We have spent untold billions on cleaning up emissions in vehicles and industries. What these developing countries would save on not having to reinvent the wheel, or how much pollution they would save using vehicles produced with American know how, would more than offset any "balance" that the watermelons insist we owe them.
Let's give it to them free, on condition they take the Sierra Club, the Greens, ELF etc. as the price. Let these limousine losers do their thing in places where pollution is a real and visible problem, i.e. China or Africa.
Send us a postcard.
I'm finding this one a little hard to swallow.
I've thought about the polluting effects of coal and wood fires, think of why the grimy old industrial cities looked the way they did, and the only answer I can come up with is there weren't so many people then. IF the globe is warming up and IF it is caused by man, I am convinced it's because the population has skyrocketed from around 3.5 billion people when I was born in 1959 to 6.4 billion now. What has allowed all those people to be alive? Yup, western technology and western agriculture. One day there is going to be a massive culling of the herd.
Even the mighty technological west doesn't have the technology to know whether we're in a 10K cool spell or a 10K heat wave, and the 10K think is just conjecture anyway.
All of this is a lot like metabolism. You hear a lot of noise about it, and actually a lot is known *about* it, but I don't think anybody really understands it very well at all.
A very rough ballpark comparison...
Each pound of wood produces about 2.59 pounds of CO2.
Each gallon of gasoline produces about 20 pounds of CO2.
The USA burns somewhere around 250,000,000 gallons gasoline per day, that making about 5 billion pounds of CO2 daily.
There are about 2.6 billion people using cooking fires daily; assuming a very low estimate of 1 pound of wood burned per person per day, that's close to 7 billion pounds of CO2 daily - reality several times that.
So daily,
Gasoline use in USA: 5B lbs CO2.
Cooking fires worldwide: 7B lbs CO2 minimum, 20-50B lbs more likely.
So ... some 300M people, admittedly relatively heavy producers per capita of CO2, is being beat up for their contribution to "global warming", while the rest of the world, producing several times as much CO2 total, is given a free pass. It's the cumulative totals that ultimately matter, not the per-capita (which even if they dropped their CO2 production to zero could only reduce total world cumulative CO2 production by a few percent).
I'll grant we should all strive to reduce our pollution output. ...so what's being done about 2.6 billion 3rd-world cooking fires daily?
I shouldn't have been lazy and given you the referral. There is some really good stuff in there.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1535682/posts
Go to the source url
I understand. I did too the first time I saw that idea posited. A historian (forget the name, I'll try to post it later) did some research on the governmental budgets of the imperial powers from the 1890's up to the Great War. Most of the commercial enterprises in European colonies (depending on the country) were either tolerated monopolies or gov't franchises, and this historian could actually track governmental and business investment vs. actual returns. Probably didn't get all the cash flows, but he thinks he got most of them. The Belgians came the closest to making Congo pay for itself, but only through incredibly brutal enslavement of the population that created an outcry so loud the King was forced to give up control of the colony to the Parliament. The French, Brits, Germans and Italians all spent more on infrastructure, construction, capital imports, etc. in their colonies than they got out of them through extraction of primary commodities. In fact, various British governments (especially Gladstone) opposed imperial expansion because it was so expensive (among other reasons). Bismark actually gave a speech in the Reichstag indicating that colonies were economic nonsense - only after he was kicked out of office did the Krauts get into the land grab big time.
Kind of runs counter to everything we've been told for years, doesn't it? Also pokes some sizeable holes in Lenin's theory of the First World War - that it was inevitable based on the desperate search by capitalists for new colonial markets. In 1914 Germany exported twice as much to Belgium as it did to all its colonies put together...
Well, your thesis about the profitability of colonies would explain the bitterness of the Anglos about the White Man's Burden.
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