During the talks in Copenhagen over the climate change, there has been a large debate over money. Smaller, poorer countries believe the larger, richer countries should pay larger amounts. However, the “top American envoy to climate talks here flatly rejected arguments Wednesday by diplomats from poor lands that the United States owes a debt to developing nations for decades of American emissions that contributed to global warming.
American negotiator, Todd D. Stern, rejected that the United States had to pay more. However, there still is a large split and argument between the rich and poorer countries in the 200 country committee. Poorer countries argue that the United States of America should pay more because they already have become industrialized and have released the large amount of pollutants typical for an industrializing country. Todd D. Stern replied to these thoughts saying, “I actually completely reject the notion of a debt or reparations or anything of the like. For most of the 200 years since the Industrial Revolution, people were blissfully ignorant of the fact that emissions caused a greenhouse effect. It’s a relatively recent phenomenon.” While rejecting to pay more than the United States’ “fair share”, Stern told the committee that the United States would “join other industrialized countries both in cutting their own greenhouse gas emissions and in giving aid to the poorest and most vulnerable countries to deal with rising seas, drought and other phenomena that are expected to worsen as the planet warms.” However, Stern also refused to pay money to China who has “over 2 trillion in reserves”.
President Obama will be traveling to close out talks at the end of the month. He has huge pressure on him to find an agreement between the many countries involved that will be followed by all in attendance and be “concrete and formally binding”. In Copenhagen, meanwhile, police are preparing for large scale protests. On Wednesday, Danish police raided a building that contained paint bombs, bolt cutters and shields. The demonstrators were preparing to uses these to get over and around barricades. No one was arrested in the seizure of these materials. There is also a large march planned for Saturday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/10/science/earth/10climate.html?ref=earth
1 comment:
Global warming is a huge issue and should be treated as one by all countries. In the future there should be regulations put o all countries to amount of pollutants it puts in the atmosphere. For countries already high industrialized that means fixing the pollutant problems with new technology. For developing countries that means they can’t use harmful technologies in creating their countries. But this article brings up a good point, who should pay for past damages?
This is a very good question. Now I think this would be unfair to blame on the USA. Any other country in our position would have done the same thing. Global warming is more of a recent development and the USA can’t be faulted for their industry before this revelation. Every country wants a strong economy and would have functioned in the same manner.
India and Chinese leaders have gone on record and said they won’t be more “green” if t hurts their economy. That is not the way countries need to look at this right now. Countries may need to take a little hit to become more earth friendly. But in the long run, the will be happy.
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