Date published: 2005/03/15
The BBC says:
Environment and energy ministers from 20 countries are meeting in the UK to discuss climate change and how to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
As well as representatives from the G8 group of rich nations, ministers from emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil are taking part.
The two-day brainstorming session, which will take place in London, will not involve binding commitments.
Instead, ministers will exchange ideas and discuss new technologies.
...
The Kyoto treaty, which came into effect last month, aims to cut the carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions of industrialised nations to 5% below 1990 levels by 2012.But the US administration has argued that meeting the target would cost millions of US jobs, many of them "exported" to developing countries where pollution would continue anyway.
"The target that was given to the United States was so unreasonable in our ability to meet it that the only way we could have met it was to shift energy intensive manufacturing to other countries," James Connaughton, head of the White House Council on Environment Quality, told the BBC.
"That has economic effects and that also has job effects."
Unless some real scientists and engineers are involved in the talks, its hard to see this as being anything more for most of the attendees other than a convenient excuse to be a tourist in London. But Connaughton has one point, which the so-called environmentalists usually miss, and that is that since China is not bound by Kyoto, just shifting high-greenhouse-gas jobs to China from the West does not actually accomplish very much. The net benefit to the planet is zero or possibly negative.
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