CO2 Report
Carbon dioxide. From all the recent headlines and international summits clamoring about global warming, you might never guess that CO2 is one of nature's most common and important molecules. Plants have been absorbing it and releasing oxygen since the genesis of life on earth. No one disputes this.
Nor would anyone argue with the dictionary definition: "a colorless, odorless gas, formed during respiration, combustion, and organic decomposition." The same would be true of certain scientifically established facts not mentioned in any dictionary: developing and developed nations alike manufacture CO2, chiefly as a by-product of fossil fuel combustion; post-industrial societies such as the US, Canada, Europe, and Japan produce stupendous quantities which far exceed those of third world countries on a per capita basis; over the last 100 years, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has skyrocketed as a result of human activity; this trend has accelerated in the last several decades; and so on.
So, what is disputed? Significantly, the controversy swirling around CO2 emissions has shifted in nature during the last decade. No longer does the debate center on whether global warming is occurring. Or whether the cause is human activity. Rather, it is now generally agreed upon by a large majority of disinterested scientists from all walks of life that the world is heating up at an alarming rate, and that CO2 and other greenhouse gases are responsible.
But for once the buck hasn't stopped there. After all, it's one thing for scientists to concur on an issue, and quite another for state bureaucracies to take them seriously-and act accordingly. And yet the evidence of global warming from greenhouse gases has become just that compelling. And so the prevailing polemic among governmental circles now focuses on how radically these emissions should be slashed by every nation on earth, and at what cost to their economies. Even those with by far the most to lose, such as the US, have (reluctantly) climbed aboard the bandwagon.
Examples of recent international efforts to reduce CO2 production include the 1997 Kyoto Summit, and the follow-up Nov. 1998 U.N. climate change summit in Buenos Aires. In Kyoto, the industrialized nations made substantial commitments to cut back their CO2 emissions. And although the U.S. Senate has voted not to ratify the resulting Protocol, unless developing countries like India and China agreed to share the burden, Bill Clinton recently signed the Protocol anyway-becoming the last leader of a major industrial nation to do so. In addition, late last year in Buenos Aires, all 160 countries of the world approved a resolution linking Hurricane Mitch to "the need to take action to prevent and mitigate the effects of climate change."
This change in attitude seems to have been assimilated without much fanfare by most observers, including the mainstream press-as if the new consensus were the result of just another U.N. spat smoothed over by diplomatic tit for tat. But the emergence of this new paradigm could not be more significant. Because its acceptance by governments the world over, despite the adverse consequences to their economic interests, illustrates the magnitude of the potential danger. Granted, nobody can predict with certainty what will happen if greenhouse gas emissions are not curtailed sharply in the years to come.
But the question no longer is, can we afford to take action? The question is, can we afford not to?
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