Wednesday, December 12, 2007

It is time to make up with Mother Nature

The latest news from the Bali climate conference is that no real news at all.

The UN chief continues to urge the U.S. to be more skeptical. The final conclusion from the conference this week will include a call for industrialized countries to consider cutting emissions blamed for rising temperature by between 25 percent and 40 percent by 2020.

The United State, of course, is refusing to accept such guidelines, thereby continuing to ignore the rapid rate of ice cap melting in the Arctic.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says negotiations with the U.S. will have to be made down the road. This is unacceptable. Scientist have lately discovered that the Arctic ice cap will disappear by the end of 2012. this means that road to negotiation will soon be flooded. We do not have the luxury of time to delay this negotiation.

New technologies are emerging that could slow global warming but it won’t happen in time. Demand for oil must be lessened, low mileage, gas guzzling automobiles ‘must’ become a thing of the past, driving habits need to be severely curtailed, oil companies need to place their profits in alternative energy and stop searching for new oil.

Scientific predictions of rising seas, worsening droughts and famines, and melting ice sheets are real. These predictions are not made lightly. Refusal to heed these warning signs all indicate that the world’s coastlines will drastically change in the very near future.

Deep cuts in emissions cannot be put on the back burner until it is ‘more convenient’ for the U.S. oil companies and their puppet politicians.

“The reality in this business is that once numbers appear in the text, it prejudges the outcome and will tend to drive the negotiations in one direction,” said Harlan Watson, a lead U.S. negotiator. This is absolute crap! This mouthpiece for the oil industry is a major stumbling block in moving forward with forcing America to change its environmentally damaging policies. Any negotiator worthy of the title knows that numbers need to be set in order to have something tangible to work with. He is simply stalling at the behest of oil companies and other puppet politicians.

Anyone with a clear, ethical conscience toward protecting our environment can enact environmental legislation without having to be told by the rest of world that we need to do it.

The U.S. and China, as the top emitters of greenhouse gases, needs to step up now and make the first cuts in emissions, help poorer countries develop in a more environmentally friendly way and provide the technological assistance to do so.

We are all in this together. The U.S. needs to abandon its notion that we are too big to answer to anyone. We answer to Mother Nature and she is not happy.

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