USA: no deal on environment for a decade

The United States of America has no intention of signing any deal on reduction of Greenhouse Effect Gases (GEG) for at least another decade, according to reports released recently.

Harlan Watson, an advisor to President George W. Bush, has declared that the USA will not be associated to any renegotiation of the protocol of Kyoto in 2005 and will not take any position regarding the protocol until 2012.

The USA has decided to go its own way on GEG emission, which through the greenhouse effect (heat constantly building up within the Earth’s atmosphere due to the inability of heat to be released, caused by a shield formed by GEG in the stratosphere), leads to global warming. In keeping to the limitations on GEG emission stipulated by Kyoto, the USA would have to take industrial measures which would mean serious numbers of job losses.

Basically, the administration has to decide between what is good for the world ecology in the long term and what is good for the US economy in the short term. The choice for the political class is obvious.

Harlan Watson stated in an inter-governmental meeting on the environment in London on Tuesday that “It is excluded by the USA that anything like Kyoto can be ratified by the US Senate. This is the reality of the present situation and for the near future”. The USA alone is responsible for 25% of the world’s GEG emissions.

Spelling the message from the US administration on the Protocol of Kyoto loud and clear, Harlan Watson added: “Kyoto would be a hard blow to our economy, sending millions of Americans into unemployment and it would undermine the capacity of making long-term investments in clean energy”.

In short, to continue to pollute, to protect employment at home…To hell with the rest of the world, with future generations of mankind…but would any other politicians in any other country act otherwise?

Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY PRAVDA.Ru