Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
United States and China would cut more than low emitters such as
Mexico and India.
The Polluter Pays Principle
asserts that climate-related economic
burdens should be borne by nations according to their contribution of
greenhouse gases over the years. The U.S. bill would be by far the largest.
The Ability to Pay Principle
argues that the fi nancial burden should
be borne by nations according to their level of wealth. This would
again be most costly for the United States, but all Western nations
would suffer.
Whichever mix of principles may eventually be agreed to by the
world's sovereign nations will be costly in terms of money and disrup-
tions in established ways of doing things. But inaction could be more
costly and disrupting. No one really knows because the changes that will
be brought on by climate change are at best uncertain and probably
mostly unknown.
An added consideration is that any changes that might be made seem
trivial in terms of what they will accomplish in any time span that
humans can relate to. We are required to think about times a few
hundred years from now, an inconceivably long time in terms of human
life span. However, our Revolutionary War ancestors worried about life
in the twentieth or twenty-fi rst century. That is the reason they wrote
the Constitution. We should be able to do the same.
The Environmental Protection Agency has determined recently that
a massive and very probably impossible 60 percent reduction in carbon
dioxide emissions by 2050 would reduce global temperature by only
0.2ºF by 2095.
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Does anyone believe that emissions from the world's
power plants, motor vehicles, and agriculture can or will be reduced
by 60 percent forty years from now? As of 2010, the world's emissions
are continuing to increase, as they do every year, and there is little
likelihood of declines in the next few decades as the less developed
nations race to industrialize, using mostly the readily available fossil
fuels, predominantly coal, as their main energy source.
The Framework Convention on Climate Change was negotiated at
Rio De Janiero in 1992. Since then, the world's emissions of carbon
dioxide have increased by 28 percent.
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The Kyoto Protocol was adopted
by most of the world's governments in 1997, but since then, carbon
dioxide emissions have increased by 22 percent. In 2008, they reached
about 36.5 billion tons, and the trend is still upward. In the 1990s,
carbon dioxide emissions grew at an average annual rate of 0.9 percent;
since 2000, the increase has been 3.5 percent annually. In 2009, a widely
