"... they don't feel much like sacrificing their rising standards of living on the West's "green" alter."
BLASPHEMY !!!
Posted on 05/14/2007 12:31:09 PM PDT by GMMAC
The Third World mocks our green agenda
Lorne Gunter, National Post
Published: Monday, May 14, 2007
Quite rightly, much has been made of the United Nations' bizarre decision to place Zimbabwe's environment minister at the head of its Council on Sustainable Development (CSD). But what has been missed in the coverage of last week's CSD meetings is the UN's utter inability to convince developing nations to join the industrialized world in curbing greenhouse gas emissions. Without such an agreement, emissions savings by developed nations will be completed swamped by increasing emissions from developing nations long before the Kyoto accords run out in 2012.
It is ridiculous, of course, that Francis Nhema, Zimbabwe's minister of tourism and sustainable development, should be elected to head the CSD. His election was opposed by Canada, the European Union and the United States. But even in their opposition to Mr. Nhema, the developed world's UN delegations couldn't get things right.
His selection was objected to on human rights grounds.
For instance, Germany's environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel, noted that the EU had imposed travel sanctions against Zimbabwean government officials because of that nation's atrocious human rights record. "It would not be possible for us to invite the next chair" to visit Germany, Mr. Gabriel said, or even "to have contacts with the chair." Aw, what a shame.
However, as Zimbabwe's UN ambassador, Boniface Chidyausiku, asked a BBC interviewer: "What has sustainable development to do with human rights?"
A Zimbabwean official is an idiotic choice because the Zimbabwean government has turned its own country into an environmental wasteland, not because it has opposition politicians beaten and dissenting journalists imprisoned.
Starting in 2000, Zimbabwean strongman Robert Mugabe began forcing white farmers from their land and divvying up their holdings to thousands of urban blacks with no knowledge of farming.
Where once Zimbabwe was "the breadbasket of Africa" -- a rich nation that fed not only its own people, but exported vast quantities of food --much of its arable land is now unused, or even unusable.
Most of the new land owners quickly realized they had not the stomach for the hard work of small-plot farming. Decades-old orchards and hardwood timber stands were felled for firewood. Whole woodlots disappeared.
Mature coffee plants were uprooted in favour of maize crops, then the maize plots abandoned when the crops died from want of tending. Machinery left behind was stripped for parts. Barns and storehouses were looted, then razed.
It is ridiculous to make Zimbabwe head of the UN's environment council, not because it censors its media and sends thugs against its opponents -- as bad as those actions are -- but because the government has made such a hash of its own environment.
Still, the real news out of the CSD last week should have been the collapse of talks for a post- Kyoto treaty on global warming.
As regular readers will know, I don't buy the theory (still unproven) that carbon dioxide emissions from human activity are dangerously warming the planet. But if you do, the collapse of the CSD negotiations should show you what a farce Kyoto has been all along.
The developing world was not part of Kyoto's emissions caps. But Kyoto's defenders have always reassured the world that countries such as China, India, Indonesia and Brazil would be brought under the caps in whatever treaty replaced Kyoto.
Now that the need to bring these nations within the international emissions-reduction regime is real, though--and not merely some years-off theory -- the governments of developing nations want nothing to do with the caps. They and their people are getting richer thanks to their ability to use dirty fuel sources, and they don't feel much like sacrificing their rising standards of living on the West's "green" alter.
For instance, China, with tens of thousands of coal mines already, is opening a new pit every week, and according to a recent study by Standard & Poor's, a new coal-fired power plant every five days.
By next year, China will have replaced the United States as the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter. By about 2010, India will be second.
That's not to say that the developed world has license to emit whatever it wants because the developing world is. But when environmentalists and liberal-left politicians claim Canada must meet its Kyoto commitments by 2012 lest the planet immolate, a look at what's going on in other parts of the world shows us how ridiculous and hollow such alarmism is.
Lgunter@shaw.ca
© National Post 2007
"... they don't feel much like sacrificing their rising standards of living on the West's "green" alter."
BLASPHEMY !!!
Holy sugar! The Canadians are finally thinking for once!
That’s very impressive, considering that our economy is about 5 times as large as theirs. I'll support US action of the "frightening" issue right after China gets serious about it.
Thats how it should read.
Electrical banana Is gonna be a sudden craze
Electrical banana Is bound to be the very next phase
They call it mellow yellow
(Quite rightly)
They call me mellow yellow
(Quite rightly)
They call me mellow yellow
Well hey Donovon's Mellow Yellow makes more sense than most of this!
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