THE USA IS A LOW EMITTER OF "POLLUTANTS"

(On a comparable basis)

I got my fair share of abuse recently on the BBC. "Isn't the U.S. an awful country?" ranted a Labor MP. "With only 5 percent of the world's population, it produces 20 percent of those terrible gases that are warming our atmosphere. How dare President Bush say he won't go along with the U.N.' s Kyoto Protocol on global warming!"

Holding up America as the environmental bad boy is just as ill-advised. Sure, the United States leads in per capita emissions of carbon dioxide. But what does that mean? Instead, people should focus on is how efficient we are with respect to these emissions. If India and China produce, say, one half of our emissions per citizen (as they will in a few years), they still emit far more than we do. And if their gross domestic product remains below ours, they then suffer from the twin sins of emissions and inefficiency.

So, let's get real and see how many bangs we get for each carbon dioxide buck. The best way to do this is to divide our greenhouse emissions by our economic output, which gives emissions per dollar of gross domestic product. For the 10 biggest emitters, the worst in this respect is Russia, where 148 million people produce virtually nothing. The scope of Russia's poverty is now beginning to show up in life expectancies, which are nose-diving toward the 1900 level of 50 years for males.

For this effort, let's assign the Russians an emission-economic rating of 100, the worst rate. On this relative scale, America rates a 33. The best are the Japanese, at 18, not far ahead of the United States, and mainly because of their intensive use of nuclear power. For comparison, South Africa rates a 69, Saudi Arabia-- despite its high GDP from oil revenues-- a 62, and our Canadian neighbors 36. Among the 10 largest emitters, in terms of economic efficiency, America comes in third, after Japan and Germany. That's not bad, considering our lack of nuclear, which, in recent years has provided only a bit more than 10 percent of our total energy. The basic figures needed to make these calculations are easily obtained from various government agencies, such as the Departments of Energy and Commerce.

On average, about one-third of a nation's energy use goes to transportation. So, everything else being equal (a condition that rarely obtains except in arguments like this!) nations that are bigger geographically are going to emit more carbon dioxide, even after adjusting emissions for economic efficiency.

One solution is to adjust emissions per unit GDP for the area of each country. In this calculation, the United States comes in as the number one most efficient nation on earth. The worst is the United Kingdom, where everyone is crabbing about Bush's position on Kyoto.

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A LEADING AUSTRALIAN CONSERVATIVE CALLS A SPADE A SPADE

"The Greens are like watermelons -- green on the outside and red like communists on the inside -- Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson said yesterday. Speaking at a luncheon at the Ballina RSL in the marginal northern NSW seat of Page, Mr Anderson said Greens leader Bob Brown and his party were a danger to democracy.

The extraordinary attack in the seat held by National Party MP Ian Causley by a margin of 2.8 per cent is the latest offering in a Coalition campaign to persuade wavering supporters not to experiment with a protest vote to the Greens. "They are watermelons, many of them, green on the outside and very, very, very red on the inside," he said. "They're talking about things like legalising drugs -- you know, ecstasy over the counter -- that would be terrific," he said sarcastically. "Abolishing valuable programs like work-for-the-dole and making work-for-the-dole available whether you wanted to work or not." Mr Anderson asked the 80 people at the lunch not to vote for the Greens because they were radicals. "They are not a halfway house, and please tell your friends to look long and hard before you think about going that way."

Mr Anderson said that if the Greens had existed in the 1950s, they would have been members of the Communist Party. "This idea that they are some warm, nice midway house between the Coalition and the Labor Party overlooks the fact that they're actually a home for people who in the 1950s would have joined the Communist Party." "

More here.

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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