Bush, Harper and China focus on carbon intensity to sabotage the Kyoto Protocol

“I cannot negotiate on the two degrees,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel. ... Her goal was to get the world’s biggest producers of greenhouse gases to agree to emissions cuts deep enough to limit global heating to two degrees Celsius by the end of this century, but that isn’t going to happen this year. ...

In order to meet that target, Merkel wanted countries to commit to a 50-percent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050, compared with the base-line figure for 1990. ...

Like the Bush administration in the United States, the Chinese regime prefers to talk about cuts in “carbon intensity”, or the amount of carbon dioxide emitted per unit of national income. This is simply an elegant way of dodging the issue. ...

China proposes to cut “carbon intensity” 40 percent by 2020. If Chinese economic growth continues to be about 10 percent a year, that means that actual carbon emissions in China will more than double by then. And the Bush administration’s promise to reduce “carbon intensity” by 18 percent by 2012, assuming three-­and-a-half percent annual growth in the U.S. economy, means no net cut in total U.S. emissions. ...

Merkel’s target of no more than two degrees hotter by century’s end is already dangerously high, since that would mean falls of 12 percent to 25 percent in food production in most of the main food-producing areas of the world. There is not enough reserve food production available in the world to cover that shortfall: millions of people would starve.