Business has to lead the Clean Up of the Enviroment

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Business has to lead the Clean Up of the Enviroment
Joshua S Hill, special to mongabay.com
August 30, 2007

Though the next two and-a-bit years will remain in a sort of ecological standstill, the remaining century is going to be the boiling point for earth. Will it crumble in to a roiling mass of disaster or will we finally manage to remove such a deep imprint as we have made over the past 30 years in the next 10.

According to Yvo de Boer, the U.N.'s top climate official, that decision lays firmly in the laps of business, and whether they will be able to push the rest of the world to a point where going "green" is a natural step — pardon the pun.

"Climate change may turn out to be an environmental question with an economic answer," said de Boer, at a press conference held on the occasion of the latest round of talks centering on global warming. More than a thousand experts have come to Vienna to discuss what steps can and must be taken, and how much money is going to be needed.

So far, an estimated $20 trillion worldwide is going to be spent before 2030 on energy infrastructure, and it is that money that the experts are trying to put to the best use.

Shanghai's air quality has worsened in 2007.

The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change says in a new report that industry and the private sector accounts for 86% of all energy investment, and that about $210 billion will be needed, especially in third world countries, to maintain greenhouse gas emissions.

"The investment decisions that are taken today will affect the world's emissions profile ... for many more years to come," the report warns.

The current talks in Vienna are laying further groundwork, so that a summit can be held in Bali, Indonesia in December of this year to continue talks. High on the agenda will be the need for a new treaty to replace the ageing Kyoto Protocol, formed in 1997, requiring 35 industrial nations to cut their global-warming emissions 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

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