China: Rich Are`Culprits' on Climate Change

Washington has argued it should not have to cut its emissions to a level that would hurt the U.S. economy while countries like China and India are not required to make similar cuts. While the total amount of emissions in China and the U.S. may be the same, one should note China’s population of 1.3 billion is four times the population of the United States.

This problem dates to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which set binding targets on industrial countries to cut emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases while exempting developing countries like China and India.

Negotiations on a new treaty to fight global warming will fail if rich nations are not treated as “culprits” and developing countries as “victims,” China’s top climate envoy said.

The whole world must take action to confront climate change, but developed countries have a “historical responsibility” to do much more because their unrestrained emissions in the past century are responsible for global warming, said Ambassador Yu Qingtai.

“The United States and the developed states as a whole are the countries that created the problem, caused the problem of climate change in the first place. In my view, that’s what a culprit means,” he said in an interview this week on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly debate on climate change.

Posted by Dilated_Rebel
Born and raised very humbly in a “small town” in southern California, I was a product of different worlds. Literally, part of my family descends from Mexico the rest from Portugal and Uruguay. This mixture had kept me from supporting any racist psyche found...