US greenhouse emissions down...but not because we're trying

Some good news from the Department of Energy today:  U.S. emissions of the gases blamed for global warming fell 1.5 percent in 2006. It was the first time since 2001 that U.S. emissions have dropped.

The bad news: It wasn't because we were really TRYING to cut the emissions. Instead, the DOE credited mild weather and high prices for fossil fuels.

"Unseasonably cool weather in the summer and warm weather in the winter kept power demand flat last year which reduced emissions of CO2 from power plants, while higher prices for energy cut emissions from industry and cars," Reuters reported.

Same thing with 2001. The drop in emissions then occurred because of the abrupt drop in tourism travel after 9-11.    

Reuters reports that President Bush said "the drop kept the country 'well ahead' of his greenhouse gas intensity goal, as measured by the amount of such gases emitted per unit of economic activity. However, Reuters pointed out, "U.S. emissions remained much higher than they were in 1990, a key year in international efforts to fight climate change because it is the baseline year for the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol."

Beginning next week, delegates from 190 countries are scheduled to meet for two weeks in Indonesia to work on a successor to the Kyoto agreement. Among their biggest problems: trying to figure out how to get the countries that have spurned the Kyoto Protocol but are big greenhouse gas emitters -- namely the U.S. and China -- to join in the U.N.'s fight against climate change.

But U.S. officials told the Associated Press today that when they go to Indonesia, they "will make no commitment for specific reductions in greenhouse gas emissions."

To read the full Reuters story, click here.

To read the AP story, click here.

--Craig Pittman

Comments

[hipotecas]

The Kyoto Protocol: The U.S. versus the World?

Using a variety of public opinion polls over a number of years and from a number of countries this paper revisits the questions of crossnational public concern for global warming first examined over a decade ago. Although the scientific community today speaks out on global climatic change in essentially a unified voice concerning its anthropogenic causes and potential devastating impacts at the global level, it remains the case that many citizens of a number of nations still seem to harbor considerable uncertainties about the problem itself. Although it could be argued that there has been a slight improvement over the last decade in the public’s understanding regarding the anthropogenic causes of global warming, the people of all the nations studied remain largely uniformed about the problem. In a recent international study on knowledge about global warming, the citizens of Mexico led all fifteen countries surveyed in 2001 with just twenty-six percent of the survey respondents correctly identifying burning fossil fuels as the primary cause of global warming. The citizens of the U.S., among the most educated in the world, where somewhere in the middle of the pack, tied with the citizens of Brazil at fifteen percent, but slightly lower than Cubans. In response to President Bush’s withdrawal of the Kyoto Protocol in 1991, the U.S. public appears to be far more supportive of the action than the citizens of a number of European countries where there was considerable outrage about the decision.

Carlos Menendez
http://www.segurosmagazine.es