THE CHINA - INDIA COP OUT?    

The China-India excuse for us not bothering halt global warming is a cop-out. Those two countries today are certainly becoming big consumers of fossil fuel, but they didn't create the Global Warming problems we now have. By consuming huge quantities of fossil carbon materials throughout the last half-century, we in the West created the problem. We are the biggest culprits. The 80ppm of carbon dioxide in the air causing global warming has to be removed. Increasing soil organic matter content by enhancing soil fertility is the only viable mechanism for removal, we humans have. That trees could do it is a PR fabricated fiction. We would need to plant about two trillion trees. World food production would have to totally end to make available the land needed to grow them.

Those responsible for putting the carbon dioxide in the air must be responsible for removing it. And of course that responsibility has to be apportioned justly.

This is what we do. Let's decide 1950 to 2000 as our half-century baseline period. Fortunately each individual country's use of fossil carbon materials in that period is well documented. WORLD RESORCES A Guide To The Global Environment is a publication produced by the World Resources Institute in collaboration with The United Nation Environmental Program and The United Nations Development Programme. It contains all the relevant information from which it became possible to assess each country's specific contribution to the planetary predicament of Global Warming, or more benignly "climate change".

Each country must accept the responsibility of removing the carbon dioxide that it individually added to the atmosphere and this has been catalogued. This catalogue will be added next month.Then adjacent to the Index will be a table listing each of the world's countries, along with their individual contribution to Global Warming. It's will be shown as a percentage. Then next it is shown as the number of parts per million of carbon dioxide each country is obliged to remove. The agricultural land area, comprising both croplands and grazing lands available to sequester the CO2, is then listed. In the adjacent column is listed the increase in soil organic matter needed in that land to honor the country's responsibility. It is nominated as the percentage point increase required. That increase in soil organic matter is required to a depth of one foot or 300mm. That depth of soil weighs about four tonnes to the hectare, or 3600 pounds to the acre.

Using ballpark approximations. If equating it as pure carbon, just halve the percentages. If equating it to carbon dioxide, double the percentages.

Let's consider examples. In the last half-century India discharged into the air approximately 2.3% of the world's production of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel use for all transport, industry and cement production. The world's problem is 80ppm too much carbon dioxide in the air, so India's responsibility is 2.3% of that, or approximately 2ppm. Carbon dioxide from cement production is generally around two to three percent of a country's total carbon dioxide emissions. For India cement production would contribute approximately one sixth of one part per million. Cement production we can tolerate until a substitute becomes available. The farming and pasturelands of India add up to 181 million hectares. So India has to increase the fertility in those soils by less than one percentage point to be totally innocent of any contribution to our current Global Warming mess.

Australia discharged 1.2% and is thus responsible for removing 1ppm.

China discharged only 9.2% so it must remove 7ppm.

United States discharged 27% so must remove its 22ppm.

Europe discharged a whopping 38% so must remove 30ppm.

Thus the US and Europe will be obliged to enrich soils in other countries as well as their own to satisfy their international obligations.

Many affluent countries won't have enough land to sequester their accumulated apportionment so those countries must pay for and develop soil fertility in the countries that do have the land. As they're generally Third World countries, that also becomes the perfect aid package. It's totally fair and it's totally just, and we create a wonderful, fertile and healthy world. Then to keep it wonderful we simply stop mining fossil carbon material and in turn stop dumping the waste greenhouse gases produced, direct into our vulnerable biosphere.

We can and must make nations accept their responsibilities and act on them. Apart from the obvious moral and ethical considerations, there can be other inducements. For example a country may have a valuable tourism trade, so let's not visit them, and tell them why. Tourism is big business and we are the tourists. We can make the tourist trade our own personal very big stick.

A message to the young: go save the world, because all too soon, it's all going to be yours.