noam chomsky: marching off the cliff

[xchrom]

http://www.nationofchange.org/marching-cliff-1323280609

A task of the United Na­tions Frame­work Con­ven­tion on Cli­mate Change, now under way in Dur­ban, South Africa, is to ex­tend ear­lier pol­icy de­ci­sions that were lim­ited in scope and only par­tially im­ple­mented.

These de­ci­sions trace back to the U.N. Con­ven­tion of 1992 and the Kyoto Pro­to­col of 1997, which the U.S. re­fused to join. The Kyoto Pro­to­col’s first com­mit­ment pe­riod ends in 2012. A fairly gen­eral pre-con­fer­ence mood was cap­tured by a New York Times head­line: “Ur­gent Is­sues but Low Ex­pec­ta­tions.”

As the del­e­gates meet in Dur­ban, a re­port on newly up­dated di­gests of polls by the Coun­cil on For­eign Re­la­tions and the Pro­gram on In­ter­na­tional Pol­icy At­ti­tudes re­veals that “publics around the world and in the United States say their gov­ern­ment should give global warm­ing a higher pri­or­ity and strongly sup­port mul­ti­lat­eral ac­tion to ad­dress it.”

Most U.S. cit­i­zens agree, though PIPA clar­i­fies that the per­cent­age “has been de­clin­ing over the last few years, so that Amer­i­can con­cern is sig­nif­i­cantly lower than the global av­er­age – 70 per­cent as com­pared to 84 per­cent.”

[PETRUS]

1. Five or six years? K&R

"The IEA estimated that if the world continues on its present course, the “carbon budget” will be exhausted by 2017"