The G8 can they help us

The G8 is meeting this week and some of the major things that they are talking about are environmental and agricultural issues. They just set a target of decreasing greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2050. Well this sounds great I think it is a an empty statement by the G8 as it does not hold any of the current governments accountable for decreasing emissions and also the Kyoto protocol set ambitious goals also and very few countries have lived up to their promises so far. Like I have continually stated, the answer lies with encouraging the growth of green technologies not with making empty promises to score political points. They must actively pursue this technology and implementing the great technologies that we already have, like nuclear power plants. I would have loved to see them outline an ambitious research and development plan like they would a foreign aid plan. If I would have heard them say that they will devote at least 100 billion dollars over the next 5 years to develop abundant and clean energy sources that would have been a step in the right direction.
We will see how they tackle the food issue; they already affirmed a 50 billion dollar foreign aid package including 25 billion for Africa. I hope that they realize that they must identify the base problem and solve that and not just paper over the cracks by giving out handouts, which will never adequate help the people. A couple years ago Popular Science had a small insert about some of the major environmental problems facing the world which was really interesting which can be found on this site. These are the problems that need to be addressed in order to truly help people. In Jared Diamond’s book Collapse he outlines how one of the major contributors to societal collapse are environmental problems, and I think he is quite correct.