Fred at Fragments posted this link this morning. You should jump on over and check the article. I know I will be looking for the magazine at the B&N this week to read the rest.
Scientific American.com: A Climate Repair Manual:
“Translation of scientific consensus on climate change into a consensus on what should be done about it carries the debate into the type of political minefield that has often undercut attempts at international governance since the League of Nations. The U.S. holds less than 5 percent of the world’s population but produces nearly 25 percent of carbon emissions and has played the role of saboteur by failing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels.
Yet one of the main sticking points for the U.S.–the absence from that accord of a requirement that developing countries agree to firm emission limits–looms as even more of an obstacle as a successor agreement is contemplated to take effect when Kyoto expires in 2012. The torrid economic growth of China and India will elicit calls from industrial nations for restraints on emissions, which will again be met by even more adamant retorts that citizens of Shenzhen and Hyderabad should have the same opportunities to build their economies that those of Detroit and Frankfurt once did.”
In a earlier paragraph they telling point was:
The debate on global warming is over. Present levels of carbon dioxide–nearing 400 parts per million (ppm) in the earth’s atmosphere–are higher than they have been at any time in the past 650,000 years and could easily surpass 500 ppm by the year 2050 without radical intervention.
Too bad so much of our leadership has so much invested in the fossil fuel economy and doesn’t have the integrity to even ask the hard questions. American leadership is rapidly becoming an oximoron at the federal level. The stories in the news should give pause to those leaders in Washington though as the States begin to make the needed changes themselves and not wait for the corporate owned Federal Legislature to begin to move.
The problems the States face will be compounded by the fact that every time a State Legislature pushes for tighter controls the corporate owned Congress will protect the interests of their controllers.
Maybe it’s the “back-to-the-lander” in me that managed to hang thru the past 30 years of corporate life, but I still am convinced that we must change the way we live here in America. I guess the American Ideal I was raised with still lingers in the back of my soul. You know the one. It says we should be the shining example for the world to see. Somehow it got twisted by the greedy so that now we just appear as the abusers and users of the world.
Cross posted at North Carolina Mountain Dreams
