A Little Good News And A Lot Of Bad News

The bit of good news about global climate change regards the developed nations who signed the 1997 Kyoto Protocols a few years ago. Those nations have reduced their output of the greenhouse chemical, carbon dioxide, to 8% below their 1990 levels. That is a significant achievement, and they are to be congratulated on that accomplishment.

Unfortunately, the bad news completely overshadows that. The U.S. Department of Energy has just announced that the global output of carbon dioxide has just risen by a record amount. In 2010 the world pumped about 512 metric tons more of carbon dioxide into the air than it did in 2009. That's a jump of about 6%.

Four years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a report on global climate change. That report contained a number of scenarios from "best case" to "worst case". Guess what? The recent jump in the output of carbon dioxide is bigger than the "worst case" scenario predicted four years ago. In other words, the world is not only not solving the problem of global climate change, it is actually making it worse than the scientists thought was possible just four years ago.


And who is responsible for this dramatic jump in carbon dioxide pollution? Well, the developing nations must accept part of the blame. As they develop, they are using more energy and thus producing more carbon dioxide by producing much of that energy with fossil fuels. But they are not the worst offenders. Consider this fact -- the rise is carbon dioxide production from 2009 to 2010 is larger than the carbon dioxide production of any nation on Earth, except for three nations.

Those three nations are China, India, and of course, the United States. These three nations are the biggest carbon dioxide producers in the world -- by far. China and India because of their enormous use of coal to produce energy -- something they must control if the world is to slow (and hopefully stop) global climate change. And the U.S. because we never met a fossil fuel we didn't love and we have no political will to combat global climate change.

The United States could have easily accomplished what the other developed nations have -- a reduction of 8% below our 1990 level of carbon dioxide production. But we didn't even try to do that. That's because the corporations control the United States government, and they didn't want to spend the minimal amount of money it would have taken to achieve the reduction. They whined that they wouldn't be able to compete if they did -- in spite of the fact that the corporations in the rest of the developed world don't seem to have had a problem competing while reducing carbon dioxide production.

Instead, they spent that money on propaganda denying global climate change even exists. And far too many Americans have believed that propaganda. We should be ashamed of what our country has done (or rather, failed to do). But as long as corporations run our government, nothing will be done -- because corporations are not people (in spite of what the Supreme Court says) and they have no shame or conscience.

We must take back our government from the corporations (the 1%), not just to re-establish some economic justice, but to save the world from being ravaged by global climate change -- which is very real and dangerous, regardless of what the corporate propaganda says.