Word: rios
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President Bill Clinton and scores of other world leaders met last week at United Nations headquarters in New York City to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the 1992 environmental be-in known as the Rio Earth Summit. The heads of state were supposed to decide what further steps should be taken to halt the decline of Earth's life-support systems. In fact, this meeting had much the flavor of the original Earth Summit. To wit: empty promises, hollow rhetoric, hypocritical posturing, bickering between rich and poor, and irrelevant initiatives. Think Congress in slow motion...
...five years--real changes in the attitude of ordinary people in the Third World toward family size and a dawning realization that environmental degradation and their own well-being are intimately, and inversely, linked. Almost none of this, however, has anything to do with what the bureaucrats accomplished in Rio...
...didn't accomplish. One item on the agenda at Rio, for example, was a renewed effort to save tropical forests. (A previous U.N.-sponsored initiative had fallen apart when it became clear that it actually hastened deforestation.) After Rio, a U.N. working group came up with more than 100 recommendations that have so far gone nowhere. One proposed forestry pact would do little more than immunize wood-exporting nations against trade sanctions...
...what to do about the climate changes caused by CO2 and other greenhouse gases has fared even worse. Blocked by the Bush Administration from setting mandatory limits, the U.N. in 1992 called on nations to voluntarily reduce emissions to 1990 levels. Five years later, it's as if Rio had never happened. A new climate treaty is scheduled to be signed this December in Kyoto, Japan, but governments still cannot agree on limits. Meanwhile, the U.S. produces 7% more CO2 than it did in 1990, and emissions in the developing world have risen even more sharply. No one would confuse...
Despite a massive investigation by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the Texas Department of Health, the cause of this epidemic was never identified. But families of the dead and deformed babies filed a lawsuit blaming pollution from U.S.-owned factories located just across the Rio Grande in the heavily industrialized Mexican town of Matamoros. The defendants all denied causing the epidemic of birth defects. But just days before the case was scheduled for trial in 1995, the last of the companies agreed to settle the lawsuit. Dozens of companies paid a total of $17 million to the families...