07 May 2005
The Climate of Man
Elizabeth Kolbert’s three-part New Yorker article quotes former Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee who claimed “equal per capita rights to global environmental resources” at a climate meeting in New Delhi three years ago. It is not hard to sympathize with the resistance of the Bush Administration to this expression of the “ethos” behind the Kyoto Protocol. Just because developing countries are late to industrialization should not mean they can make the same mistake that industrial nations have made by contributing to global warming.
There are two separate problems here. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions and world poverty must be solved independently. If compensation or transfers to emerging markets are in order, they should not be made at the expense of the world’s environmental health.
The Bush Administration declares its ingenious formulation of “greenhouse gas intensity” as a measure of progress towards solving the human-caused warming of the earth preferable to the absolute scale of pollution. This allows a nation to grow its economy so it “can afford investments and new technology.” Why not devote part of that investment to equilibrating the welfare of emerging markets. Perhaps the added wealth that it would create in those other communities would also engender technologies that helped save the planet.
Elizabeth Kolbert’s three-part New Yorker article quotes former Indian Prime Minister Vajpayee who claimed “equal per capita rights to global environmental resources” at a climate meeting in New Delhi three years ago. It is not hard to sympathize with the resistance of the Bush Administration to this expression of the “ethos” behind the Kyoto Protocol. Just because developing countries are late to industrialization should not mean they can make the same mistake that industrial nations have made by contributing to global warming.
There are two separate problems here. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions and world poverty must be solved independently. If compensation or transfers to emerging markets are in order, they should not be made at the expense of the world’s environmental health.
The Bush Administration declares its ingenious formulation of “greenhouse gas intensity” as a measure of progress towards solving the human-caused warming of the earth preferable to the absolute scale of pollution. This allows a nation to grow its economy so it “can afford investments and new technology.” Why not devote part of that investment to equilibrating the welfare of emerging markets. Perhaps the added wealth that it would create in those other communities would also engender technologies that helped save the planet.
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