Environmental Responsibilities

Title of Article: UN chief warns on climate change
Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/6410305.stm
Date of Article: 2nd March 2007

The Response:
Although Mr. Ban’s first address on the issue of climate change was clichéd, the focus on climate was timely, if not late, in the face of recent observance of erratic weather on a global scale. Hopefully through this, and future talks on climate, we can expect more emphasis and rigour in deriving a solution on the current problem.

Mr. Ban has presented a very fresh perspective, stating that climatic change could spark war or conflict. This claim is fairly doubtful as this phenomenon is caused by many factors over many countries, and thus difficult to pin the blame on anybody. But Ban worries are justified because his target audience was none other than the US.

The US produces a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions and refuses to sign the Kyoto protocol. If a sudden wave of climate change occurs, the blame will be pushed towards the US. The US reasons that it does not want to be hindered by such restrictions by Kyoto and that it has no one to answer to. But ultimately it should be less obstinate and take some responsibility in clearing up the debris it generated from its developments. Since the US comes in tops for harming the environment, the onus is on her to take the lead in undoing its wrongs and offsetting the global trend of widespread pollution.

Mr. Ban warned that less developed countries in Africa and small island states would suffer most from global warming, although they were least responsible. But look at Nigeria, whose corrupted administration led to an inefficient system of the extraction of crude oil, resulting in pollution being released in uncontrolled amounts, ultimately resulting in contributions to global warming. What about Singapore, equally contributing to global warming through industrialization? Nowadays, it seems that no one can declare to be innocent or blameless in causing global warming.

But a hard fact to swallow is that we will suffer greatly the ramifications of global warming. With a double impact- that we are both at the tropics and an island state- we will be hit doubly hard by global warming. Before I go on to yet another clichéd ending on conservation, I would like to highlight an irony: that while many other sources regard human’s hand in climate change a self-evident truth, the truth is that this is only a likelihood and not an established truth, as shown in this article. In the past, scientists project habitat loss and animal extinction as consequences of human activities. Now they project climate change. What next? This goes to show how we lack an intrinsic understanding in this whole spectrum of knowledge. But do we need to understand how we cause climate change to act on it? Isn’t the loss of species enough to deter us from polluting the environment? Must it have a true impact on our livelihood that we start thinking about how to save the environment? Mr. Ban expresses hope for the future, and I hope it is so.
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