Word: costa
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...public remarks are at odds with the Administration's stated support for restoring Zelaya. After Zelaya sneaked back into Honduras last month from an exile imposed by the military, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said he and Micheletti now had "the best opportunity" to sign a deal brokered by Costa Rican President Oscar Arias that would reinstall Zelaya while granting amnesty to the coup leaders. But Amselem, a holdover from the George W. Bush Administration, called Zelaya's surprise reappearance in Tegucigalpa "irresponsible and foolish." Many diplomats say Micheletti took that as a green light to resist the accord...
Infinito insists there is no such danger. But critics say Arias' decision betrays his international rhetoric and reflects a worrisome trend. His environment minister had to resign earlier this year over a mining-related scandal. Luis Diego Marin, regional coordinator for the Costa Rica-based conservation group Preserve Planet, calls Arias a "hypocrite," insisting that behind Costa Rica's green facade today is "tremendous disorder." Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, a political rival and environment minister under Arias' predecessor, Abel Pacheco, and vice president of the Washington, D.C.-based Conservation International, says Arias "has been neither serious nor coherent on the issue...
...heard concern is that Arias seems to believe Costa Rica can "plant its way out of the carbon-emissions problem," as environmentalists frequently complain. Rather than attack emissions more aggressively at its industrial and automotive sources, eco-advocates fear Arias simply wants to plant more trees in order to create what they call a deceptive net-zero emissions balance...
That might make Costa Rica technically carbon-neutral, but it would still leave venues like the capital of San Jose "choking" with factory pollution and Central America's notoriously black bus exhaust, says Roberto Jimenez, a Yale MBA who recently started the activist group co2neutral2021.org. "If there is a country in the world that can [achieve carbon neutrality], it's Costa Rica," says Jimenez, but he warns that the country's emissions "continue to grow unchecked." The Arias government is toying with the lofty idea of building a super-modern, solar-powered monorail system in the capital to acheive carbon...
...factor, say Arias' critics, is that the 69-year-old leader is part of Costa Rica's pre-environmental generation - from a time, before the 1980s, when Costa Rica actually had one of the world's highest deforestation rates. Today's greener Tico cohort came of age after Arias' first presidency in the 1980s, when he won the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to end Central America's bloody civil wars. "Mr. Arias has definitely remained in the past century," says Rodriguez, whose Social Christian Unity Party is a liberal counter to Arias' more conservative National Liberation Party. He argues...