by Daniel Relph

Created on: April 07, 2010

There is a movement out there that says that the developed country should be solely responsible for paying to fight climate change. We saw this in the Kyoto Treaty which divested undeveloped countries of any responsibilities. In fact, the Kyoto Treaty handed the developing countries a blank check making the Treaty an instrument for the transfer of wealth from the developed countries to the undeveloped countries.

This is counterproductive. If we raise the cost of producing a product in a developed country then the production of the product will be moved to an undeveloped country; thus, skirting the requirements.

As the Kyoto Treaty was written, those underdeveloped countries would not be required to meet the carbon dioxide emission standards. This would not result in the overall reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. This is one of the reasons the treaty was not ratified.

There are many who would look at a chart and point to how the per capita emission of carbon dioxide and point out how developed countries have emissions 1000 times higher that our poorer neighbors, but that is a myopic point of view.

Our poorer neighbors also benefit from the goods and food we produce burning this fossil fuel. This is the foundation on which our global economy is based.

It is true, we know who burns the most fossil fuels, but we have not completely identified the source of the carbon dioxide increase in the atmosphere. You see, fossil fuels have a low carbon 14 ratio, but the carbon 14 ratio in the atmosphere is higher than we would expect and it appears that there are other sources of carbon dioxide emissions other than the burning of fossil fuel. There are missing pieces to the puzzle.

Missing or not we know many steps we can take to mitigate the problem. The problem of climate change should be addressed directly rather than indirectly. Reducing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is just a small part of what we must do. For example, we should work at increasing the albedo of the Earth surface.

Albedo is the measure of the reflectivity of a surface. We all know black absorbs more heat than white and it is the absorbed heat that causes the greenhouse effect. We should use whiter surfaces to reflect more heat thus lessening the greenhouse effect.

We all know blacktop or macadam roads absorb a lot of heat; these roads get hot enough to burn your feet on hot summer’s day and the heat they emit contributes to the global warming.

This is why all of our major cities are heat

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