I will talk about the "dark side" of this interest for climate changes. Everybody knows about the Kyoto Protocol. Here’s what it amounts to in short:
"The Kyoto Protocol is an agreement under which industrialized countries will reduce their collective emissions of greenhouse gases by 5.2% compared to the year 1990 (but note that, compared to the emissions levels that would be expected by 2010 without the Protocol, this limitation represents a 29% cut). The goal is to lower overall emissions of six greenhouse gases - carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, sulfur hexafluoride, hydrofluorocarbons, and perfluorocarbons - averaged over the period of 2008-2012. National limitations range from 8% reductions for the European Union and some others to 7% for the US, 6% for Japan, 0% for Russia, and permitted increases of 8% for Australia and 10% for Iceland.
The Kyoto Protocol assigned each country a certain amount of "hot air", that is, a specific space of air that every country can pollute. Since developing countries don't have to respect this agreement rich nations are allowed to build factories in developing countries without considering the rules against pollution (even though those rich countries have ratified the Kyoto Protocol). Russia has recently ratified the protocol because they found out a new way to raise money. We know that Russia is a very big country, this means a lot of space and a lot of "hot air" to sell.
All the environmental associations have a lot of good reasons to exist. but one of their target is to keep this problem big, or even bigger, in order to survive. So we need to know how much of what they say is true and how much is not.
Supporting environmental issues is very important if you (as a politician) want to be popular, because at the moment it is very unpopular not to do so. In order to be reliable a politician needs an environmental association to back him/her up. Moreover If you start a "green-policy" you’ll get money from the government, even if you don't really care about the environment at all.
Fear of unpopularity induces a lot of artists to join the "live earth" movement and, frankly, we know that the real target of Madonna and her sponsors is not to make people aware of global warming but to be popular.
My point is that, most of the time, all this green hearts are not so green...but just painted so.
Irene Moroni
