Arctic Peoples are trying to team up with Tropical Island folks in trying to raise awareness and combat global warming.
"We are two of the world's most vulnerable areas," Sheila Watt-Cloutier, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC), said of the low-lying islands -- at risk from rising sea levels -- and the Arctic -- where the ice is melting.
"Linking up makes a lot of sense," Watt-Cloutier, whose organization says it represents 155,000 people in Canada, Greenland, Alaska and Russia, told Reuters on Thursday.
The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet because of a build-up of gases from fossil fuels burned in cars, factories and power plants, according to a report by 250 scientists from 8 countries this month. That could make the North Pole ice-free in summer by 2100, driving species like polar bears toward extinction and undermining indigenous hunting cultures, the report says.
In turn, a global thaw could push up sea levels by almost a meter (3 ft) by 2100, according to U.N. projections, threatening to sink low-lying Pacific island states like Tuvalu or the Marshall Islands or the Maldives in the Indian Ocean.
With their homes under threat, many indigenous peoples in the Arctic and islanders say the United States, the world's biggest polluter, bears much of the blame for global warming after Washington rejected caps on emissions under the 128-nation Kyoto protocol.
I don't know what's worse. The Kyoto protocol is a sticky tape solution to a very complex, humungous problem. It is inadequate and will draw funds away from finding alternatives to fossil fuel energy use. It's a bit like a small room with 128 people marginally promising not to exhale and breathe as much going into the future, promising that their kids who will increase the number in the room will do as agreed. Then there's the inordinately large guy who eats way more than his fair share who says, "No fuck off, I'm not going to agree to that, not even as a symbolic gesture. Me and my kids are going to burp, fart and exhale as much as we like!"
One shakes one's head.
I'm not a Greenie, but this situation plain sucks. Yet, I guess as a civilisation we're hooked on just burning stuff for energy, come hell or highwater, and at the rate we're going we'll be getting both.
- Art Neuro
3 comments:
The Kyoto concept is brilliant, and will probably save the world. The current expression of Kyoto is flawed, and is preventing the US and Oz from signing because of its flaws. For the record, both Australian Conservatives and US Republicans supported the initiative, but it was 'stolen' by the UN between conception.
Kipling had a solution for dealing with ones whom " the truth you've spoken, Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools"
My friends call the enemy of Conservatives communists. I am on record as not being against communism. I am opposed to the tyrants who proclaimed communism. Denouncing many such tyrants as murderers and thieves. Some of my former students had paarents that were communists, and they were good people. Go figure.
Anyways, Kyoto was rewritten prior to implementation to ignore third world nations pollution and China and India.
For the record, Australia meets its current obligation, were it to have signed the document.
The reason why a fair implementation of Kyoto would be brilliant is that it would use market forces to cut greenhouse gas emmissions. The Weasel believes it will work effectively.
Well, a couple of things that make Kyoto Protocol suck.
In concept, it aims to stave off the build up of GH gasses by 10 years, making what would happen by 2090, happen at 2100 instead. Well, Back in 1997, it might have seemed like a nice gentle curve to aim for, but clearly, 7 years on, it is not nearly a severe enough target to aim for. The lowered target of 2090 might be enough to change the world's weather patterns drastically.
So no, in concept it does suck.
In execution, the USA and Australia balked because India and China essentially got their growth conessions. Indeed, you can't unlock econmic growth and industrialisation from massive growth in carbon emissions given the current paradigm of energy consumption; and that's like it or lump it, left or right, up or down. It's just a fact.
So because those two nations intend to fully industrialise, they got more carbon emission credits than the USA or Australia going forwards, and Australian and USA objected. Well, Australia and the USA are far more industrialised; they have no good reason to demand those credits for themselves.
The other issue was the issue of being able to trade carbon emission. This was disallowed because it seemed obvious that the USA could keep polluting the planet at an increasing rate while it bought 'carbon emission credits' from nations that had no chance of industrialising, artificially disincentivising them from development.
So many nations felt this would become a rort and vetoed it.
Furthermore, the USA and Australia have a large agricultural industry that emits a lot of methane which is a lot more harmful a GH gas than CO2. So trying to control those emissions was going to be harder than simply putting scrubbers on smoke stacks as the Chinese have done. How do you stop cows and sheep from farting? How do you control the metahne emission of wheat fields and rice fields? Because methods were not even planned in 1994, Australia chose to decline - and Robert Hill was honest enough to say so, so points to him.
NB I'm not bagging 'conservatives' here, okay?
The point being Australian and the USA had 3 problems: Cars, Agricultural methane, and CO2 from industrialised energy consumption, none of which could be reined in easily. It would take a fair amount of regulation to make those targets going into the future.
So Australia negotiatd a separate easier target, which was pretty much laughed at by the world; and then when the government changed, promptly refused to sign it. The USA also tried to negotiaite a separate deal but didn't get one, and when it came right down to it didn't want to regulate its industry in any way.
Ultimately that actions appears like a bit of a cop out to most on-lookers.
Part of the issue is that Kyoto does not address the need to get away from our current modes of industrialisation that relies so heavily so on carbon emissions. It says nothiong about it except saying, it's bad, let's do less and hope for the best.
It also does not address mehtods of active carbon reduction.
So even with full compliance by everybody, there's no guarantee that it's going to do ANY good at all. Not to mention the fact that it's going to cost a tonne of money. Sign or not signed, the Kyoto Protocol is not nearly good enough to help the planet.
I am not disagreeing with anything you have written so far. I do feel that involving industry through carbon credits and allowing trade would result in more than mere compliance. Hence Kyoto would be brilliant.
The absence of industry from the agreement is the reason why the US has not signed. Aus were going to sign, but were tapped on the shoulder when the US changed governments and policy.
!972 Australia's economy was the size of China.
2004 Australia' s economy is one tenth China's.
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