Essay About Carbon Emissions And Global Warming

Dealing with Global Warming
Essay title: Dealing with Global Warming
Dealing With Global Warming
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. They have also set up
more initiatives such as producing “cleaner” fuels, the use of
renewable energy sources has come