[Tactitus]

Originally Posted by Toccata & Fugue

Europe is rubbish in the Environment, yet somehow the United States contrives to be worse.

If the twenty biggest economies cut their emissions then the problem would be resolved.

Um, sure. But cut by how much and at what cost? The devil is always in those pesky details.

The Stern report estimates that the cost of this would be 1% of global GDP per year (currently about $400billion), in the medium to long term it would save money because renewables and energy efficiency measures would have paid for themselves and after that everything is free (barring maintenance costs) - there would also be significant advantages gained through energy security.

I think there are a number of flaws with the Stern Review but the proof here is really in the pudding. If so few countries are able or willing to meet their Kyoto targets (and Kyoto is only a small fraction of what is needed) then that suggests (to me) that it might be rather difficult. But hey, prove me wrong!

I think the best proof you could offer would be to meet your Kyoto targets (preferably without doing major damage to your economies). It seems silly to me to argue how emissions reductions sufficient to halt global warming are really quite affordable and doable while so many countries are failing to achieve even the modest Kyoto reductions. Something's not adding up.

If you believe, as many do, that the US is fighting in the Middle East in order to secure oil reserves then it is amusing that US military spending is 10% of its GDP, which is about $439billion military budget plus an additional $170billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Well, amusing in a let's-wildly-inflate-the-numbers sort of way.

First of all, you can't just charge all military spending against Iraq and Afghanistan. Contrary to what you may have heard, the US military maintains ships and bases in all sorts of places outside the middle east--even places that don't have oil! In any case, US military spending is running at 3.7% of GDP. Second, total appropriations (including supplementals and continuing resolutions) for military operations, base security, reconstruction, foreign aid, embassy costs and veterans' health care for Iraq and Afghanistan are about $700B from 9/11/2001 through mid-2008 (source). The $700B figure represents the off-budget costs of Iraq and Afghanistan above and beyond the cost of maintaining the military. Averaged out over the ~7 years since 9/11, that represents an average of about $100B a year (although higher in the later years and lower in the earlier years). In FY2006, for example, $116B was allocated and US GDP that year was $13.2T; so the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan that year was about 0.9% of GDP--nowhere close to 10% of GDP.