Originally posted by: Jack31081
I see a lot of misunderstanding of the Kyoto Treaty.
here's a useful graphic:
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2005/...6/business/20050216_KYOTO_GRAPHIC.html
Here's what it shows:
- China and India, the 2nd and 3rd largest polluters on the planet, don't have to do a thing because they are labeled as 'developing' countries. Any actions they take are completely voluntary.
- Countries like Russia, the Ukrain, Poland and the UK can
increase emissions between 2008 and 2012 under the Kyoto Protocol.
- Russia in particular can increase emissions by more than the US would have to decrease theirs between 2008 and 2012.
- Even though many countries ratified the Kyoto treaty,
only 11 countries are bound by it.
What the graphic doesn't show is that countries that have lower emissions now than in 1990 get 'credits', which they can use to increase their emissions...or
sell to other countries, so those countries don't have to decrease their emissions as much.
Now if American ratified the treaty, we would be perfectly within the bounds of the treaty to just pay Russia for all their credits. We then wouldn't have to change one thing. Now if the US did ratify the treaty, which do you think is more plausible? That American corporations would spend billions to lower their emissions, or that the governemnt would just shell out taxpayer dollars to let the corporations continue as before?
Reducing greenhouse gases is great and work should be done to that end, but Kyoto would just have stolen money from US taxpayers.
And let's not even get into what the effect of the Kyoto protocol would be, because frankly, no one even knows if it would have much of any effect at all.
My opinion is that the world will change to less polluting sources of energy on its own long before global warming becomes the catastrophic crisis that environmentalists are claiming it to already be. We used to use horses to pull carriages. We don't anymore. We used to power every boat by steam. Now only a few. New energy sources will replace fossil fuels for reasons other than 'enviromental protection', but the environment will be better off for it.