Beyond Kyoto: Time to Switch Targets?

from Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality:



Beyond Kyoto:
Time to Switch Targets?
To curb climate change, suggests a new report from a top-notch global scientific team, we really ought to start focusing on rich people, not rich nations.

July 13, 2009

By Sam Pizzigati


The world’s most influential nations had their experts on climate change in Italy last week. Their goal: to get a head start on figuring out what to do after 2012, the year the current global greenhouse gas emission limits in the Kyoto Protocol expire.

That head start will have to wait. Last week's talks made little progress. Environmentally, the world still stands starkly divided — between the “rich” nations of the developed world and the “poor” nations still developing.

The basic conundrum: The rich nations have historically dumped far more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than the world’s poor nations. But the poor nations, as they develop, are catching up. If they continue to develop — along current lines — the Earth will soon start frying even if the rich nations do significantly cut back on what they’re dumping.

So the rich nations want the poor to start limiting their emissions, something they haven't been expected to do up to now. The poor nations don't see such limits as appropriate. Why should people in poor nations, they ask, have to accept a lower standard of life than people in rich nations?

Negotiators have so far found no “fair” solution to this standoff, and they won’t find any workable solution — suggests a just-released study from the National Academy of Sciences — unless they stop talking about rich and poor nations and start focusing on rich and poor people.

Rich and poor, the new study points out, live in every nation, and the rich — wherever they live — pound a much greater carbon footprint than the poor. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.toomuchonline.org/articlenew_2009/july13a.html

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