The G8 summit issued a lofty declaration: we are going to reduce our carbon emissions by 50% by the year 2050. No details on how, no timetable between now and then. So I guess the plan is to do nothing for the next 40 years, then blow up half our buildings and melt down half of our vehicles?
I can't help noticing that the current crop of leaders of the G8 nations will mostly be dead by 2050. They see no popularity benefit to making the sacrifices and investments that might actually enable their nations to achieve the goal, which means at this rate none of the 8 nations are likely to ever reach actually succeed in doing so. George Bush not surprisingly turned in the worst performance, whining that they should do nothing to address climate change until such time as China and India sign on to the effort. Bush of course is a lame duck with only months remaining- but even in his good times when his approval rating topped 50%, he considered climate action to be in the same category as human waste: something best not touched.
Nobody could consider this a bold step. It was a meaningless photo opp tidbit. "The G8 are responsible for 62 percent of the carbon dioxide accumulated in the Earth's atmosphere, which makes them the main culprit of climate change and the biggest part of the problem," the World Wildlife Fund said shortly after the G8 issued a communique on climate change. "WWF finds it pathetic that they still duck their historic responsibility," the campaign group said in a statement.
Well,"pathetic" is perhaps an understatement, but this observer will accept that description. For perspective on the G8 non-goal, consider the other tidbit of climate change news this week: half the corals reefs in US waters are in poor condition, in serious danger of dying out due to warming ocean waters (yes that means climate change) plus water pollution.
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Comments: 16
Of course, the best way to engage China and India on this issue is to get going ourselves. Whatever happened to the idea that the U.S. is a world leader? There is a real risk that other countries, such as China and India, will take the lead in renewables. Then we will be an importer instead of an exporter of renewable energy technology. But the good news is that these G8 summits may be irrelevant. Corporations, like Wal-Mart, are shifting on their own because they see there is a market for green products. That said, favorable policies would certainly speed up the process.
It's ridiculous on many fronts including simple economics, not just global warming, to continue the course as outlined by the G8.
The one resource America has more of than most nations is creative imagination. That is where we ought to be digging for "oil." Recently, I read an article about researchers at Purdue University who designed new portable invention that can pull enough hydrogen from water, on demand, to make such a system to power fuel cells manageable. The psychology of creative imagination seems to indicate that it is proportionate to the freedoms one experiences in society. When I read in a Norwegian paper that the US Congress played lap dog to Bush's request that anyone's privacy in America can be violated if anyone in the alphabet village police forces have a suspicion of terrorism. So Bush's recent efforts to dilute sound responses to global warming and to curtail US freedoms have weakened America on oh so many fronts.
Unbelievable. So global warming is a lie and a filthy science/commie plot that is designed to destroy Exxon, but if it were true it would be great because there will be no ice up there at the north pole to interfere with oil drilling. Sheesh!
I am not wasting my time googling "sunspots", thank you very much.
"The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."
He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.
Mr Bush, whose second and final term as President ends at the end of the year, then left the meeting at the Windsor Hotel in Hokkaido where the leaders of the world's richest nations had been discussing new targets to cut carbon emissions."
What a Putz...
In the late 60's ands early 70's, when I studied environmental science, there was a lot of similar divisive discussion about acid rain and certain heavy metals as we now have about global warming, the sulfur components in car and industry exhaust, the destruction of our old hardwood forests, trout stream deaths and priceless outdoor archaeological antiquities in Rome crumbling from the ph of the rain, for example. Eventually, there was enough of a human impact to force politicians to enact legislation cleaning many of the responsible particulates through better fuels, catalytic converters and more efficient smokestacks. A decade and half later, we had the same debate about eliminating chlorofluorocarbons from air conditioners, refrigeration systems etc. when NASA discovered we were generating these ozone-layer holes at the poles that were broadening out to the middle latitudes. But the science to our self-destruction of the ozone layer had already been discussed in 1973, in of all places, Kyoto, Japan, when international scientists began sharing their results, including University of Michigan and Harvard researchers who had linked the destruction of our very fragile ozone layer (O3, which absorbs a critical-for-survival wavelength of the sun's UV radiation) to man's use of oxides of chlorine, such as the bi-product of a rocket launch or chlorofluorocarbon usage. Well, it took some decades, but if we remember the mid-1980's... when everyone was decrying the science that was forcing the auto and refrigeration industry to re-tool... and then slowly, the ozone layer replenished itself to an extent.
The computer and software systems now being utilized to gauge all this has grown as exponentially as the typewriter has evolved into Internet cloud programs, and the GPS data communications system. Climatology is an integration of most earth sciences, and as each bit of empirically derived data gets crunched into our growing, comprehensive understanding of the global warming model, it only is reinforcing that model.
The major problem with many enviros on this issue is there is no allowing they can be wrong. The recipe for partially helping a process that may not even be happening is a drastic life style and economic change. Do you think anyone even the Euros will do any such thing to their population? Any such attempt even there will result in a huge political change and a retrenchment of such policy.
In short, the option to do much for a problem that does not seem to be mankind influenced would be costly. The amount of money directly and indirectly spent on global change already is in the trillions. The sole effect has been to spend money.