Word: carbone
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...World leaders have accepted the principle that urgent action is needed to drastically cut back on carbon gas emissions if we are to even begin to address the problem. That's why they negotiated the Kyoto Protocol on climate change two years ago, requiring that the industrialized nations over the next decade reduce their output of carbon gases to 5 percent below the 1990 level. The U.S. is slated for a 7 percent reduction, on the basis that it is the greatest culprit, producing some 25 percent of all greenhouse gases despite housing only 4 percent of the world...
...going to require wrenching, expensive changes in American consumer behavior to achieve the Kyoto target. After all, right now we're going in the opposite direction. Forget about 7 percent below 1990 levels - the government's own Energy Information Agency predicts that at current rates of consumption, U.S. carbon gas emission levels will be 33 percent above 1990 levels by the time the 2010 deadline rolls around...
...tough steps necessary to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Last summer, American consumers went into revolt when the gasoline price crept past $2 a gallon, and Washington was obliged to scramble for remedies. And yet, $2 a gallon may not be high enough: European success in curbing their own carbon gas emissions has relied in part on taxing gasoline so heavily - as much as 75 percent of the pump price in Britain goes to tax, compared with about 8 percent in the U.S. - that consumers pay more than $4 a gallon. And that serves as a powerful incentive to drive less...
...latest round of talks, Washington had a new proposal - counting forests, which supposedly serve as "carbon sinks" by soaking up greenhouse gases, as part of a country's emission reductions. Indeed, the U.S. negotiators went in suggesting that the scale of U.S. forests was sufficient to cut its emission reduction target in half. Needless to say, the Europeans aren't having any of it, dismissing the proposals as a specious attempt to let the world's biggest polluter off the hook...
...carbon sink" proposal looks set to send any chance of implementing Kyoto down the drain. Instead, it will live on in that guilty limbo where we all store those New Year's resolutions we know we're never going to keep. The Clinton administration may have signed the treaty, but it did so safe in the knowledge that it wouldn't have a prayer in the Senate. After all, Al Gore wasn't about to become the candidate urging Americans to trade in their SUVs for battery-powered cars, and if the Europeans weren't going to accept America...