Pollution Essay: Strategies for Dealing With Global Warming :: Environmental Global Climate Change

Global warming effects the world on three different levels, the most obvious is the international level, then national and local level. Global affects everybody and should the levels continue we could see significant sea level rises. Many countries are very bad offenders when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions especially the U.S.A and the Russians. Due to this and many other climatic and diplomatic reasons, world summits are held every five years, Rio in 1992, Kyoto in 1997 and most recently Johannesburg in 2002. In the kyoto summit of 1997 an agreement was decided upon, in this pact all the countries that attended agreed to reduce carbon emissions down to the levels of 1990. All the countries that attended the talks signed up to the pact and agreed to reduce carbon emissions. Although they had signed up to it, the americans, could not ratify what they had agreed upon in kyoto because the senate did not pass it. By the time of the johannesburg summit in 2002, the Americans were being villified by the world press as they were now trying to go back on the agreement they signed and trying to find loopholes. The U.S.A and other nations are trying to put forward the idea of convergence. This idea suggests that the developing world is allowed to increase their carbon emmissions and the developed world reduces theirs: [IMAGE] Fig 1. Idea of convergence The idea suggests that the developing world is allowed to industrialise, while the developed world, with its technology and know-how reduce theirs to an acceptable level. On a national level, i will look into two nations that are dealing with the kyoto agreement in different ways. The U.K is firmly sticking to what it signed up to in Kyoto, it is the leading country in carbon emission reduction and it is leading the way in many initiatives it has set up. It is leading the way in the use of low sulphur fuels, which do much less damage to the environment.