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Is it fair to ask underdeveloped countries to "go green" when many advanced industrial countries owe their success to destructive environmental practices?

My father used to say, "Son life is not fair," and he often pointed out that fairness doesn't necessarily mean that the one who has less gets more. Often, in the real world, it may very well mean that the one who has more will have to take less.

This question brings on a sad laugh when you consider it seriously. Just what does going green mean. For those of us in the industrialized world, it means buying a hybrid car, turning down the heat, using bio-fuels. It might mean taking public transportation rather than driving. It could be that we walk the 4 or 5 blocks to the store rather than drive. For the more aggressive it could mean installing a solar power system, or possibly a high tech wind mill. From the industrial perspective it can mean anything from making operations more efficient to installing multi million dollar stack scrubbers to clean our plant emissions.

But what about underdeveloped countries? From the individual perspective you might have to look hard to find a car. Turning down the heat may mean burning a few less buffalo chips. Walking to the store is a given, and travel beyond ones town or village is already unheard of, except on rare occasions when you ride an overstuffed bus or train along with a multitude of others.

Industrially speaking, the economics of changing fuel sources or spending millions of dollars on efficiency studies is not feasible. The very process of making things more efficient has probably already been exercised to the degree that it can be within the available resources. The very idea of spending millions of dollars to install a stack scrubber only to have it languish through lack of maintenance is laughable, considering that it would be impossible to keep it up once installed and would likely bankrupt the company just to purchase it.

As with everything in the world, the issue is not really about fairness, it's about power and survival. It is wrapped up in politics and international economics. It is tied to world trade agreements and access to world markets. And it is directly related to who had the economic power to dominate.

The issue of going green, on the other hand, is a question of appearances. In reality, I believe that it is should be a question of what makes sense. Where do you get the biggest bang for the Carbon footprint.

Have you ever asked yourself who the real

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