All countries but the U.S. agree to enter talks about Global Warming

Not surprisingly, the United States has refused to join new talks
aimed at producing a new set of binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions that would take effect beginning in 2012, according to a Washington Post article reprinted in today’s Deseret News.

All other industrialized nations have agreed to participate in this new round of talks on the issue. The U.S. has agreed, however, to engage in “non-binding” dialogue without any commitments to reduce carbon dioxide emissions associated with climate change.

According to the article, the Earth has warmed by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century. Most scientists agree that carbon dioxide and other gases that accumulate in the atmosphere as byproducts of fossil fuel burned by automobile engines, power plants and industry accounted for part of the temperature increase. The warming has melted glaciers, heated oceans and shrunk the Arctic ice cap.

Further, One hundred fifty-seven countries, including every major developed nation except the United States and Australia, have agreed under the Kyoto Protocol to cut their 1990 greenhouse gas levels by an average of 5 percent over the next seven years. Now the question is whether the new round of talks will produce more ambitious emission reductions after 2012, when Kyoto expires.

The U.S. produces 1/4 of the world’s greenhouse gases. It feels that setting mandatory limits would significantly damage the nation’s economy.

Which proves that financial issues and monetary greed supercede the health and welfare of our planet and all life on it, in the eyes of the officials that oversee the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America.