Hollow Victory Thankfully

Gotta hand it to that “dumb” President we’ve got. He just pulled a fast one on the G-8 bunch. He gave them a big bag of nothing and got exactly what he needed in return. Not much better outcome than that.

Slow and Steady?

Did you get that big concession? We agree to cut our carbon emissions by fifty percent by 2050! That’s not global emissions, but our human contribution—a drop in the emission bucket on a global scale. The exhalation of the world’s greenery, the belching of our volcanoes and a myriad of other totally uncontrollable sources greatly outweigh our puny putt-putts. But, we promise that 42 years from now it will be halved. Frankly half of us won’t be alive then! This is, of course, the genius of the agreement. Who are the tree-huggers going to blame when the due date shows up?

It is a perfect sop in order to get an acknowledgement of an important fact. The elephant in the room—in fact the pair of promiscuously breeding elephants—is China and India. They aren’t players on this carbon footprint stage, despite that fact that they grossly outnumber the rest of us and they studiously ignore all efforts to preserve or maintain the environment. We in the insignificant US number a tad over 300 million folks. The two Asian giants tally nearly three billion! And, they are increasing their numbers exponentially! Emerging middle-class society in those nations means demand for cars, technology, products of every stripe will rise rapidly. The justification they use for ignoring environmentalist demands is that they don’t want to hamper their emergence from the Dark Ages into modern society. Frankly, I don’t blame them.

The tough part to swallow, however, is the demand that we curb our use, stifle our industry and disrupt our life-style to battle the questionable concept of “global climate change,” (remember it isn’t “warming” anymore…) while they don’t do a thing in Asia. We are urinating in the slip-stream if we hope to make an impact against those numbers.

So, the coup of the meeting was that George W. gave up that pie-in-the-sky carbon footprint cut for the future and in return got a pledge that we will tighten the screws on China and India to cooperate or we won’t be bound by any restrictions.

Bravo, Mr. President, bravo!