posted on July 25, 2001 08:42:40 AM new
"Seattle officials on Monday said the city would meet greenhouse gas reduction targets in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and blasted President Bush for pulling out of the international treaty," Reuters reported yesterday. "'We are sending a message to the federal administration that it is time to act, just like the rest of the world,' Mayor Paul Schell told a press conference. Dubbed the Emerald City for its lush urban forests and boasting some of the greenest power and waste programs in the nation, Seattle pledged to beat the Kyoto goal to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 7 percent from 1990 levels and try to cut three times that much. Largely through conservation and purchases of wind power, Seattle will meet rising local electricity demand without spewing more greenhouse gases over the next decade and will offset its entire emission load by planting trees, reducing road traffic and recycling industrial waste and heat. The mitigation would cost city-owned utility Seattle City Light about $3 million a year, a tiny fraction of the half billion-dollar annual budget, officials said, rejecting Bush's assertion that the Kyoto treaty would wreck local economies. The United States is the world's biggest polluter and the only major power to pull out of the Kyoto treaty, although the remaining signatories on Monday agreed to adhere to the targets anyway at a meeting in Bonn. 'It's a scandal that the White House won't step up to (the issue) and Seattle has to,' said City Councilor Jim Compton".
"The other day in Bonn the world's leading industrialized nations decided to honor the Kyoto agreement. The agreement is a binding contract among nations — excluding the United States —," writes the NYT, "under which 38 industrialized countries must reduce those emissions by 2012 or face tougher emissions goals. The vote was 178-1. So much for Bush leadership. While he called the agreement "fatally flawed," he offered nothing to take its place. That's because corporate puppet Bush represents the greatest greenhouse gas polluters in the world,American big business. What Bush means by "fatally flawed" is that the agreement, according to him, places too much of the cleanup burden on industrial countries and would be too costly to the American economy. Of course it would put a costly clean-up burden on us, because we're the ones that made the mess in the first place. We're the world's biggest polluter and we should be the world's biggest contributer to the cleanup. Remember that Bush ran his campaign with the motto that if he were to be elected, he would usher in a "responsibility era"? What a laugh. What a liar. However, knowing that Bush is a lying hypocrite and an irresponsible purveyor of global filth does not really solve our immediate problem. This past week, the Guardian reported that Bert Metz, head of the UN panel on climate change, said a 5-10 year delay in world-wide curbing of greenhouse gas emissions,emissions that the U.S. is primarily respomsible for, could very well put the task of stabilizing the atmosphere out of reach".
posted on July 25, 2001 09:18:38 AM new
Three cheers for Seattle (!!!), but it'll never happen country-wide while Bush is in. It's an economy thing. To pay for ANY type of nationwide clean-up would mean higher taxes. He wants you to have more money so you'll spend more and drive the economy while he's President. That's ALL he cares about and big business is depending on that.
