More hot air on climate change

Reduce dependency on foreign oil, clean the environment. What's not to like?

August 14, 2005

First, off the bat, global warming is a widely accepted scientific theory. The cause of of global warming is emissions from carbon based fuels. Don't take our word for it, look it up. For starters, check out the Sierra Club’s website, which has a lot of information on the impact of America’s cars and light trucks on greenhouse emissions, and the website of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) admits that global warming is a very real and dangerous problem that the world must face and develop a solution in order to combat.

What sane person could argue against developing clean energy sources and decreasing global demand for Middle Eastern oil? Only right wing nuts, oil companies, and their shills. The same people touting the recent 6-nation global-warming reduction pact between the US and 5 Asia-Pacific countries.

MYTH: W is a global warming genius who is taking all the right steps to try and curtail “global warming”

In a surprise move that caught Europe's smug moralists and the environmental movement's noisy extremists flatfooted, the United States announced in Vientiane, Laos, last week that it was joining five other nations - China, India, Japan, South Korea and Australia -- in a new pact that offers a refreshing and effective alternative route to tackling the problem of climate change….

First, it breaks the climate-change deadlock. This is the agreement that responsible scientists and public officials have been seeking since the failure of the Kyoto Protocol became evident at the global warming conclave in Delhi two years ago. Call it "Beyond Kyoto" -- Way Beyond Kyoto.

-- James Glassman, “The Right Way Forward on the Environment,” Tech Central Station, 8/4/05

A longstanding dilemma confronting the Australian and U.S. government has been how to deal with incessant pressure from green politicians and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to be seen to be "doing something about global warming."…

…The Times commented that "Britain's environmental policy is a costly shambles based on dubious predictions about the future," which statement might serve as an appropriate epitaph for the entire global warming scam.

It is therefore not surprising that the final G8 climate change communiqué comprised mostly vague generalizations about stabilizing greenhouse gas emissions. It also contained such masterpieces of ambiguous diplowrite as "While uncertainties remain in our understanding of climate science, we know enough to act now to put ourselves on a path to slow and, as the science justifies, stop and then reverse the growth of greenhouse gases."

This statement was, of course, interpreted by green interests as signaling that President Bush had accepted that the science already shows that human emissions are causing significant global warming. More balanced commentators pointed out the alternative meaning, namely that any need to deal with greenhouse emissions is contingent on new science establishing first that there is a problem that needs fixing.

--Bob Carter, “Game, Set, and Match?” Tech Central Station, 8/5/05

He may be disdainful of the Kyoto global warming treaty, but President Bush is nevertheless a "force to be reckoned with" when it comes to plotting the best way to cut the production of greenhouse gases, according to conservative climate change experts assembled by a Washington, D.C. think tank on Tuesday….

"Bush resembled an isolated soul in a global warming tug of war, stubbornly being dragged modestly closer to the line where all of the other major world governments and an increasing number of the world's corporations are already standing," Knobloch stated following the G8 summit.

--Monisha Bansal, “Group Applauds Bush on ‘Global Warming’,” Insight, 8/3/05

REALITY

Looking at the recent news about a 6-nation global-warming reduction pact between the US and 5 Asia-Pacific countries (Australia, Japan, India, China, and South Korea), Australia and the US are the big players in this pact, as they are the two developed countries that decided to opt out of the Kyoto protocol, taking issue with the fact that developing countries did not have to adhere to the emissions reduction standards. Shouldn’t the developed and technologically advanced nations of Australia and the US have just a bit easier of a time cutting emission than a developing nation that can barely keep its industries open, let alone clean? Isn’t that one of the advantages of being a developed nation?

In addition to getting the opportunity to upstage Europe with their supposedly better package of measures to stop global warming, the United States gets the added political benefit of completing this deal without the participation or aid of Europe. See, Tony Blair—we can create environmental pacts too!!

Basically, the pact is between the 2 largest polluters in the world (the US and China) and another country that questions whether global warming even exists. As was reporting in The Australian very recently that:

[t]he Howard Government has denied global warming exists, or that burning coal releases greenhouse gases that lead to climate change, in court documents defending its approval of two Queensland coalmines. The denial comes a fortnight after Environment Minister Ian Campbell released a report warning that climate change is inevitable as a result of rising greenhouse emissions and that the impacts must be considered in all future government decisions. Senator Campbell signed off on the Isaac Plains and Sonoma Coal projects in May, determining that neither needed assessment under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. The two mines will produce a combined 48 million tons of coal over their lifetime.

Of course the United States is no stranger to the art of greenhouse denial.

Basically we now have the biggest polluters in the world, and hence the largest consumers of oil, crafting an environmental treaty with a government that doesn’t believe that the burning of coal is harmful to the environment. This is the real Bush Doctrine, leaving the foxes (or chicken hawks) to guard the henhouse.

So, what does the new Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate actually specify as their goals and new course of action? Basically they want to cut greenhouse emissions in half by the end of the century. Details of the pact, however, will not be finalized until November. These nations are giving themselves 95 years to make their nations 50% more responsible to our earth's climate? Well that should be easy—oil-guzzlers China, the United States, and India will probably cause the world to exhaust its petroleum reserves years before 2100, so that should give these 6 countries a really good shot at meeting their targets.