Re: US Steel sues for quotas, Volume 11, Number 10, March 14 - March 20, 2005
I'm not sure I am that violently opposed to the Kyoto Protocol but I do view it as a seriously flawed protocol, badly designed and poorly implemented so far. Clearly the Clinton administration did also, as I recall, mostly because China and India were excluded from responsibility.
Some countries will find Kyoto works to their detriment while others will find it works favourably for them, depending in some instances solely on their geographic locations.
In addressing the science, however, I suspect that much of the excess CO2 production is caused by human activity.
But all that activity is not limited to production of CO2 by factories, mills and automobiles. Certainly, deforestation, a human activity, has contributed to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
One healthy, fully-grown deciduous tree converts about 50 pounds of CO2 into oxygen per year. I've read that 20 percent of the world's oxygen supply is provided by rain forests. Mature forests all over the world are being destroyed and if one multiplies 50 by the number of trees falling every day, the answer will provide CO2 that we breathe today that we didn't yesterday.
So maybe planting trees is part of the answer. Deforestation was not addressed in Kyoto; maybe it should have been.
Roger Coldiron,
Bratislava, Slovakia
