The President of Good and Evil by Peter Singer

Author:Peter Singer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Tags: POL000000, BIO011000, PHI005000
ISBN: 9781921799594
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2010-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

Regrettably, neither Lehrer nor Gore asked Bush what he meant by being ‘more even-handed’. Thus a chance to learn more about Bush’s ethical thinking was missed and we can only speculate about why he thinks that the fact that the treaty did not require any reductions in emissions from developing nations means that it is not ‘even-handed’.

Since Bush believes that people should be held responsible for their actions, he should be sympathetic to the principle that the person who breaks something is the one who ought to fix it. How does that idea apply to the atmosphere? Well, there is a problem right now about climate change because over the past century or more, industries in the developed nations pumped a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Most of that carbon dioxide is still there. Although the developed nations have only about one fifth the population of the developing nations, at present rates of emissions the contribution that the developing nations, including China and India, have made to the problem will not begin to match the contributions of the developed nations until 2038. (That calculation includes gases released by clearing forests, the one area in which the developing countries are now worse than the developed countries.238) In other words, if the developed nations had had, during the past century, per capita emissions at the level of the developing nations, there simply wouldn’t be a problem at present, and there would be plenty of time to prevent any problem coming about. As far as the atmosphere is concerned, the developed nations broke it. If those most responsible for breaking something should do the most to fix it, then the developed nations owe it to the rest of the world to fix the problem. Instead, they are making it worse—and the United States is the chief culprit. Despite having less than 5 per cent of the world’s population, it is the largest producer of greenhouse gases, responsible for 25 per cent of all emissions. China, with more than four times the population of the United States, emits only 60 per cent as much carbon dioxide.239

Some say that because the United States has planted so many trees in recent decades, it has actually soaked up more carbon dioxide than it has omitted. But this is an arbitrary way of calculating emissions, for the United States has only been able to reforest because it had previously cut down much of its great forests, thus releasing the carbon into the atmosphere. The balance sheet depends on the time at which the accounting is done. If the period includes the era of cutting down the forests, then the United States comes out very badly. If it starts from the time in which the forest had been cut, but no reforestation had taken place, it comes out much better. In any case, forest regrowth offers only a temporary solution to the greenhouse problem. It locks up carbon only while the trees are growing. Once the forest is mature, it ceases to soak up carbon from the atmosphere.

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