'Nano Hypocrisy'

" ... "Contraction and convergence" is the phrase they need to learn. It
was coined almost twenty years ago by South African-born activist Aubrey
Meyer, founder of the Global Commons Institute, and it is still the only
plausible way that we might get global agreement on curbing greenhouse gas
emissions worldwide.

The notion is simply that we must agree on a figure for total
global emissions that cannot be exceeded, rather as we set fishing quotas
in order to preserve fish stocks. Then we divide that amount by six and a
half billion (the total population of the planet), and that gives us the
per capita emission limit for everyone on Earth.

Of course, some people (in the developed countries, mostly) are
currently emitting ten or twenty times as much as other people (mainly in
the developing countries), but eventually that will have to stop. The big
emitters will gradually have to "contract" their per capita emissions,
while the poor countries may continue to grow theirs, until at an agreed
date some decades in the future the two groups "converge" at the same level
of per capita emissions. And that level, by prior agreement, will be low
enough that global emissions remain below the danger point. ... "

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