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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Dec. 18, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Global warming: Superpolluter tries to duck

By Brian Becker

Before delegates gathered in Japan for the Kyoto Conference on Global Warming, the U.S. Senate voted unanimously that it would never ratify an international treaty imposing new restrictions on the emission of carbon dioxide and other pollutant gases inside the United States unless the developing countries are compelled to limit their efforts to modernize industry.

Global warming is a rise in the average temperature of the Earth’s climate due to a buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Over the past 100 years, temperatures have increased by about one degree Fahrenheit, making the 1990s the warmest decade on record.

Two-thirds of the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere come from a handful of the most developed capitalist countries, including the United States, Britain, France and Japan. China emits 11 percent of these pollutants and India about 3 percent.

In Russia and the other former republics of the Soviet Union the rate of carbon dioxide emissions has dropped significantly. This is not because of new emission controls but because industrial production has dropped by 50 percent since the return to capitalist rule in 1991.

Many scientists predict that unless the emission of greenhouse pollutants like carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxide—smog from cars—is significantly reduced, the Earth’s temperature will rise by another two to five degrees in the coming century.

That level of warming would create dramatic shifts in climate. This could lead to massive flooding, torrential rain in some areas and devastating drought in others. Island nations could be entirely submerged.

And the balance could be altered in the fragile relationship between fresh water and salt water in low-lying areas in the coastal region of the Gulf of Mexico and in estuaries like the Chesapeake Bay. An increase in the spread of virulent tropical diseases could also result, as mosquitoes and other pests spread to a widening geographical area.

Given the serious problems that global warming has already created and its capacity to hurt the whole planet, you might wonder why the best the U.S. Senate can come up with is a resolution promising to do nothing unless the Third World and developing countries take onto their backs a problem they did not create.

By pointing the finger at China and India, these politicians are merely serving the oil, gas and industrial polluters who have poured billions of dollars into their campaign coffers in the last years.

U.S. capitalists don’t want to pay the cost of restricting emissions because it cuts into their profits.

The purely capitalist response the Clinton administration has promoted to meet this growing ecological disaster is a "pollution credit." This would allow U.S. industrialists whose pollution output is under the imposed limit to sell their right to pollute to another company.

China, India and the Group of 77—a bloc of developing countries—argue that emission limits should be imposed on the Western capitalist countries, since they are the biggest polluters. Industry in the United States—a country with 6 percent of the world’s population—emits 25 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide released by burning oil, coal and natural gas.

The G-77 group also argues that the Western capitalist countries have accumulated the rewards of electrification, modern transport, sanitation and clean water not only from developing their home industry—but through the colonial plunder of Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Imperialism has left a legacy of great poverty and underdevelopment that these countries are now seeking to overcome.

Take India, for example. British imperialism became very wealthy from its long tenure as the colonial overlord and super-exploiter of this naturally rich subcontinent. But India today has nearly 400 million people who live in absolute poverty.

Hunger, mass homelessness, and lack of proper sanitation or clean water have created unimaginable squalor.

India needs to modernize. But 70 percent of its electricity is generated by burning coal. Coal is the cheapest and most available source of fuel for its power plants. Coal is also a major contributor to greenhouse gases.

Imperialist countries should pay India reparations for centuries of enforced robbery and plunder. If these imperialists demand instead that India restrict its emission levels by reducing the use of coal, that amounts to an ultimatum to suspend Indian efforts to modernize and overcome poverty.

This is the real meaning of the U.S. Senate resolution.

Kamal Nath, India’s former environment minister, spoke for many oppressed countries when he told the Washington Post in a recent interview that "developing countries cannot subsidize the prosperity of the developed countries."

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