“It is like the tobacco industry asking for compensation for lost revenues as a part of a settlement to address the health risks of smoking,” said Jake Schmidt, the international climate policy director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The worst of this racket is that they have held up progress on supporting adaptation funding for the most vulnerable for years because of this demand.”It's hard to feel sympathy for the Saudis. While they try to sweeten their argument with a line about wishing to use the compensation money to "achieve economic diversification", they're not exactly short on cash; they can always build fewer palaces and flog off a few football teams and a gold-plated jumbo jet or three to make up whatever cash they need. Or they could have a word with the recording industry's lawyers; they're quite good at turning untenable monopolies from products of economic circumstance into legally enforced perpetual hegemonies.
Please keep comments on topic and to the point. Inappropriate comments may be deleted.
Note that markup is stripped from comments; URLs will be automatically converted into links.
http://www.atriplex.info
Thu Oct 15 03:10:23 2009
This, I think, is where Iran is being smart. I'm still personally not sure whether Iran is trying to pursue nuclear weapons - they may well be - but their desire for domestic nuclear power generation is completely understandable. They are aware that their own oil isn't going to last forever, and moving domestic energy use to nuclear is a pretty smart way to make sure their oil lasts as long as possible, and their country can be sustained once it's gone.