Climate Change

Kyoto accord won't hurt economies: Clinton [CTV]:
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...the U.S. isn't one of the 157 countries that have signed onto the Kyoto accord...

But Clinton encouraged the delegates to press on.

"There's no longer any serious doubt that climate change is real, accelerating and caused by human activities. We are uncertain about how deep and time of arrival of the consequences, but we are quite clear that they will not be good," said Clinton.

He put down the main U.S. fear about Kyoto -- that it would hurt the economy by chaining it to greenhouse gas reductions that were not achievable.

That claim, he said, "was flat wrong."

"And we know with every passing year we get more and more objective data (that) if we had a serious disciplined effort to apply on a large-scale, existing clean energy and energy conservation technologies -- we could meet and surpass the Kyoto targets easily in a way that would strengthen, not weaken, our economy," said Clinton to applause from the delegates.

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Inuit sue US over climate policy [BBC]:
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Temperatures in the Arctic are rising at about twice the global average.

The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a vast scientific study which took four years to compile, found that the region will warm by four to seven degrees Celsius by the end of the century, with summer sea ice disappearing within 60 years.

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"The United States is the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter; it has turned its back on the Kyoto Protocol and has not put in place measures to limit its emissions," said CIEL's senior attorney Donald Goldberg.

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The petition asks the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to investigate the harm caused to Inuit by global warming, and to declare the US "...in violation of rights affirmed in the 1948 American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and other instruments of international law."

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