I agree it is unfair, but also please recognize that Sweden benefits from the US economy greatly. Most of the worlds products come form US corporations, although they are often manufactured in Asia. Never the less our economic power helps the whole world by acting a focal point for wealth distribution. I don’t mean giving our wealth to other people, I mean it allows other people a safe place to invest and get goods and services. So to that end Sweden isn’t totally isolated from US prosperity.
But neither is the US isolated form other countries, despite what we pretend. I don’t think the US lives up to its responsibilities to the rest of the world. We look at the fact that we give out a lot of money, but we don’t recognize that we took a lot of that to begin with from other countries. I don’t think that is necessarily wrong, after all if they don’t have the resources to process something and we do, why not go there and buy it out from them. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t hold a responsibility to said nations. And furthermore to the world. We have the power, the only power, in a lot of cases, and we need to do that right thing.
Unfortunately, US corporations would rather spend any amount of money to fight reform, they will spend more than reform costs! Why? Well because the US companies have to answer to stockholder, and said stockholders aren’t willing to see a temporary loss of income. That actually costs them more money, because when the stocks reappreciate in value they taxed on that again as income. So it is worth it to them to give up long term profits and efficency, and spend a lot of money, to prevent changing anything.
That stuff about enforcing the Kyoto treaty causing the US economy to hurt is BS. You really need to look at who is saying that and why. It is universally accepted that technology improvement creates more jobs than it destroys. The same argument against the Kyoto accords can be clearly demonstrated to be wrong , the same people said the same thing about phones and computers, and look at where we are now because we didn’t list to them!
And a few notes on global warming. We are going to see severe consequences sooner than most people think. I spoke with a climatoglist recently and have learned some very interesting, and distressing things. First of all this sea level rise stuff is pretty much BS, Antarctica isn’t going to melt, and Greenland might not melt that much. What will happen will be bad, and soon. In the next 50 years it is pretty much guaranteed that we will see two new massive deserts, and these couldn’t form in worse places. India, and the central US.
A study was commissioned to study the effects of a desert in the Central United States.. and things wont be that bad. We can still feed ourselves and export food. Not as much though. But it will hurt the economy for obvious reasons. A lot of people will lose a lot of money very quickly. India is pretty much dead, there will be a narrow subtropical region along the coasts, but the interior depends on the glacial melt from the Himalayans, which won’t be there anymore. So their population will either be displaced, or die off. So a country of over a billion people will only be able to support 5% of their populations water needs. India is the US’s only counter, economically or militarily, to China.
