The Greens are confident enough now to start showing their mailed fist.
The Climate Divide
Reports From Four Fronts in the War on Warming
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
NEW YORK TIMES
There is a growing consensus that the first world owes the third world a climate debt.
...........Disparities like these have prompted a growing array of officials in developing countries and experts on climate, environmental law and diplomacy to insist that the first world owes the third world a climate debt.
The obligation of the established greenhouse-gas emitters to help those most imperiled by warming derives from the longstanding legal concept that "the polluter pays," many experts say.
"We have an obligation to help countries prepare for the climate changes that we are largely responsible for," said Peter H. Gleick, the founder of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security in Berkeley, Calif. His institute has been tracking trends like the burst of new desalination plants in wealthy places running short of water.
"If you drive your car into your neighbor's living room, don't you owe your neighbor something?" Dr. Gleick said. "On this planet, we're driving the climate car into our neighbors' living room, and they don't have insurance and we do."
Around the world, there are abundant examples of how wealth is already enabling some countries to gird against climatic and coastal risks, while poverty, geography and history place some of the world's most crowded, vulnerable regions directly in harm's way.
nytimes.com |
