The Bali talks about climate change are progressing reasonably well, with Australia the 37th country to agree to cut emissions. However, the elephant in the room is of course the US and Canada administrations, who have resisted negotiations. Although some US officials don’t want to join the protocol, others are starting to do something about it. This week Congress is discussing a revolutionary new Energy bill that really starts to look at a sustainable future.
It would repeal $21 Billion in oil subsidies to spend on alternative energies, increase minimum mpg for cars, include incentives for efficiency and new technology as well as pledging renewable electricity production to be 15% by 2020. This bill will inevitably be vetoed by President Bush, or filibustered by the Republican minority. All the same, the US Congress deserves recognition and support for thinking constructively about increasing efficiency and promoting solutions to this problem.
At some point in the future we should decide that those people who keep resisting alternative fuel development or reduction in polution emissions (assuming global warming and resource depletion aren’t reversed or untrue) are to be held accountable. They are committing a crime. Maybe until now that crime can be waived by exactly when will we decide “they should have known” and regard obstructionism as something to be jailed for?
We aren;t talking small peas here. If true, these issues involve the premature demise of hundreds of millions of people in the next decades, horrible poverty and wars and potentially the demotion of human civilization in a new Dark Ages it will never emergence from.
…the abortion of humanity of what it could have been.
Last time I checked the US still carried the death penalty for high treason. Is this?
Dagon,
you’re an idiot.
10,000 people jetting halfway around the world to Bali (anybody want to estimate their carbon production) makes me more sure that there’s nothing to the gloom-and-doomsayers. If they really believed all that rot, they’d find someplace easier to get to for their silly conference.
jtc: We should be more tolerant of those poor demented souls like Dagon. His projection of “demise of hundreds of millions of people” simply echoes the party line, the one first formulated by Paul Erlich in the 60s. He was wrong; his followers are wrong today.
In 1968 he wrote
“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial
increase in the world death rate…”.
Wrong then, wrong now.
Dagon,
Ever wonder why the murderous scum of the 20th century have all been Communists or Socialists?
If you really believe what you wrote then wonder no more.
Australia’s new government thought about taking the “progressive” low emissions approach–for a few seconds. It took a look into the abyss, and blinked. Big talk is just that–talk.
Today’s US Congress could not think its way out of a damp paper bag.