After months of inaction by Congress, the Senate has finally decided to twiddle its thumbs some more. Note that the comic was actually published last Friday. Lest you think Stein is a modern day Nostradamus, it’s not that surprising given our nation’s poor record on global warming… but terribly disappointing nonetheless.
This news, and a nice, skimmable pamphlet from WWF got me to wondering about what the actual results of Kyoto have been. Unfortunately, macroeconomic statics such as these are often delayed by several years. Nevertheless I manged to turn up a few interesting tidbits:
- Slightly dated summary of various nations’ positions
- Change in emissions from 1990-2004 for a number of nations; LULUCF is a ridiculous acronym meaning land use change e.g; deforestation, sprawl/urbanization, etc.
- 2006 emissions for select developed nations
It seems our neighbors to the north aren’t as environmentally enlightened as you might suspect/is generally believed. At least, not with respect to carbon emissions, though they did manage to ratify Kyoto (like nearly every other nation on the planet) before electing a conservative government.
While some countries in Europe have experienced extreme growth in emissions e.g; Spain and Portugal, which have recently embraced solar & wind; overall the EU seems to be doing pretty well and has a decent shot of meeting their commitment.