USA Leads World in Reducing Carbon Dioxide Emissions
It's true. The United States is constantly vilified for being a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, for stone-walling international climate treaties like the Kyoto Protocol, and of being the source of most of the skepticism over climate change. All three charges are true in varying degrees.
Even so, care to guess which country has had the greatest reductions in carbon dioxide emissions since 2006, a year after the controversial Kyoto Protocol went into effect?
It's the good old USA -- the only major industrial power that has refused to ratify the Kyoto treaty. This information comes from the International Energy Agency:
"CO2 emissions in the United States in 2011 fell by 1.7%, primarily due to ongoing switching from coal to natural gas in power generation and an exceptionally mild winter, which reduced the demand for space heating. US emissions have now fallen by 7.7% since 2006, the largest reduction of all countries or regions.
Houston Chronicle Science Editor Eric Berger notes there has been almost no news coverage of this report in the national media. He says for climate activists, it doesn’t fit their narrative which says America’s climate position is evil and we’re addicted to coal.
Environmentalists are hoping no one will notice this report. It's what has come to be known as "an inconvenient truth." Frankly we are amazed to see it in the notoriously liberal Houston Chronicle.
It should be noted that the United States signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1998, along with 83 other countries. The U.S., however, is the only country that has not ratified Kyoto and put it in force.
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