----- Original Message ----- From: "Doug Henwood" <dhenwood at panix.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2001 9:43 AM Subject: Re: Global Warming
> James Heartfield wrote:
>
> >Presumably the consensus is so strong that the Kyoto agreement has been
> >signed by everyone (not Rumania alone) and the US president has not
> >denounced it.
>
> The scientific consensus, which even portions of big U.S. capital are
> no longer denying.
>
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This is where Dubya may be very sneaky in the larger context of his voluntary compliance line. He scraps the treaty even as he knows Corp execs will continue with whatever strategies they're putting in place to do what it takes since they believe the "threat" is real. They then come out a decade or so hence and say "we've met and/or exceed the guidelines laid out in the defunct K. agreement" and "see we are capable of doing the right thing without big government or pesky international green leviathan's telling us what to do." Good old business pragmatism scores a big PR victory.
This is not to say the guidelines in that agreement go far enough to do what it takes to "restore" the planetary ecology to a level of resilience and robustness that existed before capitalism.
Scientists appear to be learning collective action skills quite rapidly in the new century and will be a very interesting trend to watch.
Ian