Posted: 01/25/2005
Climate Change Comes Under Fire At U.N. Conference
U.S., Canada, Australia Call for Focus on Calamities Not Politics
DALLAS (January 24, 2005) – The European delegation at a global conference on disaster reduction in Kobe, Japan tried to use the recent tsunami in Southeast Asia to pressure the U.S. to agree to the Kyoto Protocol or some other form of binding emission reductions, according to experts with the National Center for Policy Analysis’s (NCPA) E-Team project.
“This is a betrayal of those whose lives have been so badly marred by the tsunami and those who would be helped in the future by a United Nations plan for natural disaster warnings and recovery,” said H. Sterling Burnett, E-Team scholar and NCPA Senior Fellow.
Dr. Burnett explained that natural disasters like tsunamis, earthquakes, mudslides and hurricanes will continue to occur regardless of the direction and source of future climate change.
“Linking the two will do nothing to help the people whose lives could be shattered by future catastrophes,” Burnett added. “All it will do is leave people living in the areas most affected by these disasters with fewer resources to predict, mitigate and recover from disasters when they do occur.”
The U.S. delegation to the World Conference on Disaster Reduction, supported by Canada and Australia, called for all references to climate change to be deleted from the U.N. action plan that will emerge from the conference.
The Kyoto Protocol is due to take effect on February 16, but Burnett said that resources devoted to slowing greenhouse gas emissions will have a negative effect on the economies of developed and developing countries.