“15,000 politicians, civil servants, green campaigners and television crews”
A carbon footprint gets ever so much smaller if it is made in the sands of an island paradise such as Bali. The UK Times has a report on a meeting so critical that it demands 15,000 politicians and hangers-on.:
the latest United Nations climate change conference on the paradise island of Bali has itself become a major contributor to global warming. Calculations suggest flying the 15,000 politicians, civil servants, green campaigners and television crews into Indonesia will generate the equivalent of 100,000 tonnes of extra CO2. That is similar to the entire annual emissions of the African state of Chad…
The meeting, which runs from December 3-14, aims to create the framework for a successor to the Kyoto treaty on reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, which expires in 2012. However, climate change’s growing political importance has led to a surge in interest in the conference, which is being held in the luxury holiday resort of Nusa Dua on Bali’s palm-fringed southern coast.
Attendees are expected to include celebrities such as Leonardo DiCaprio, the actor, as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of California, and Al Gore, the former US vice-president.
It is amazing that anyone takes these self-aggrandizing nitwits seriously.
November 26th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
Too bad these “geniuses” have never heard of teleconferencing !!! Seems strange that it appears to be more about lobbying for contracts, than any “saving” of the environment. hat a bunch of hypocrites !!! Maybe they should have held it in Detroit, the heart of the evil SUVs, but they would have to endure cold weather there and the supply of caviar and champagne that they are accustomed to is probably insufficient to supply 15,000 limo liberals.
November 29th, 2007 at 5:35 am
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