4. The Kyoto Treaty, Energy Consumption, and Beyond - I honestly have not done a whole lot of research on the Kyoto treaty, so it is hard for me to talk intelligently about this. My impression from what I have read is that it unfairly places burdens on the world superpowers which would have a negative effect on their economies.
If the burden is to be placed on someone, shouldn´t it be placed on the rich countries who can afford to make the climate better?
If you want to punish the largest economies, the effect would be a negative world-wide effect. We should be encouraging clean production as opposed to simply punishing productive economies.
By punishing them we can force them to reduce their pollution and since the rich countries pollute so much more than the poor ones, why should they not pay for it?
I think that i´ve read that the Kyoto Treaty is based on trading with pollution so that the "clean" non-polluting countries can sell some of their "right" to pollute to the polluting countries, thereby profiting from their efforts to stay clean.
Sweden is actually a good example of a very industrialized country that yet has very low pollution, and we will continue working to degrade it...
Remember, the world does pay for our consumption, but the US also pays for the world's prosperity in many ways. I am not saying that the world is dependent on America, but America does quite a bit for the world body. Yet this is often overlooked.
How exactly do you think that america does the world a big favour by existing? By dropping atomic bombs over innocent japanese people? Or terrorizing vietnam for like ten years? Not to mentin starting a war on Iraq saying that they where looking for WMD´s, only to find none and later even admitting that they had no evidence from the start? Look at the country nowadays - you hear nothing but tragedies of civil population being blown up and shot all day long. America has no control what so ever... I can´t imagine that UN would have done a worse job if we had left iraq to them.