Delegates Seek Ways to Confront Warming (Kyoto Protocol)

The ice is melting and the heat is on for international delegates assembling in Buenos Aires next week to find new ways to confront global warming under the 194-nation treaty on climate change.

The treaty's Kyoto Protocol, requiring initial cuts in "greenhouse gas" emissions by 2012, finally comes into force in February, seven years after it was negotiated. Next, European governments want the annual treaty conference -- Dec. 6-17 in the Argentine capital -- to get down to talks on steps beyond 2012 to limit heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.

"We are, in fact, only at the beginning of what we need to do," Margot Wallstrom, the European Union's outgoing environment chief, recently told European Parliament members.

But the U.S. government, which rejects Kyoto and its mandatory controls, balks at that idea.

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-global-climate,0,2300024.story?coll=sns-ap-world-headlines

with 194 countries, you'd think ONE of them would voluntarily implement the rules...Why the hell are they waiting for us?

change. GW Custer is the worst thing to happen to the world since we started to walk upright.

this. Do they honestly believe that it isn't real? I always figured that was just their cover story. Or maybe most models show that the effects in North America are going to be minimal(not sure this is the case) and they figure "Screw the world" ?

over all the plants and animals of the Earth...oh yeah, and the End Times are at hand. Who needs to conserve or seek alternative energies when the reset button is going to be pushed soon?

Not all of the Right, mind you, but enough of them think this way. Read some Dominion Theology and you'll see this line of reasoning pop up quite often.

Somehow I always have a hard time remembering that some people take that shit seriously. I mean, I know it is so, but I just can't accept it I guess.

so why bother? They can use up the world before that so the end is coming.

and it won't matter if the planet's environment is going to hell. Bush and all the true believers are gonna be saved while the rest of us will burn in eternal damnation -- presumably the end result of global warming (hell fire!). Praise the lord.

James Watt (Reagan's Secretary of the Interior) believed this (the second coming part) hence he didn't worry about the environment.

I think he loves being obstinate... like a 15 yr old spoiled brat.

the USA became irrelevant on November 2, 2004.

....Although the Bush administration rejects Kyoto, northeastern U.S. states are moving toward capping carbon dioxide on their own and allowing emissions trading. California, meanwhile, has acted to reduce auto emissions sharply.

Such state-level actions, combined with international emissions trading and Kyoto's coming into force, make it "harder and harder for the U.S. to say we're just not going to participate," said Eileen Claussen, president of Washington's private Pew Center on Global Climate Change. ......

according to a pro-Bush think tank in London, called the International Policy Network, that will publish its report tomorrow:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1128-20.htm

The International Policy Network, "which has links with some of the President's advisers, has received cash donations from the US oil giant ExxonMobil, which has long lobbied against the climate change agenda. Exxon lists the donation as part of its 'climate change outreach' programme."

Enough said?

This new way of thinking about ethics and the environment has been brought to you by the Ownership Society.