ROMANIA ALONE: As of this spring, only one industrialized nation had signed the Kyoto Treaty-- Romania. With a standard of living ranked between Libya and Lebanon, they have the least to lose. And according to Tony Judt in The New York Review of Books, post-Communist Romania is still at the Bottom of the Heap, economically and environmentally:
Communism was an ecological disaster everywhere, but in Romania its mess has proven harder to clean up. In the industrial towns of Transylvania, in places like Hunedoara or Baia Mare, where a recent leak from the Aural gold mine into the Tisza River poisoned part of the mid-Danubian ecosystem, you can taste the poison in the air you breathe, as I found on a recent visit there. The environmental catastrophe is probably comparable in degree to parts of eastern Germany or northern Bohemia, but its extent is greater: whole tracts of the country are infested with bloated, rusting steel mills, abandoned petrochemical refineries, and decaying cement works. Privatization of uneconomic state enterprises is made much harder in Romania in part because the old Communist rulers have succeeded in selling the best businesses to themselves, but also because the cost of cleaning up polluted water and contaminated soil is prohibitive and off-putting to the few foreign companies who express an initial interest.Communism was an ecological disaster, because it was an economic disaster. It is expensive to think green. The restrictions of the Kyoto Treaty would have required the US to constrict its economy by at least $100 billion a year. And if we were to accept them, we would be, like Romania, too poor to focus on the environment. Posted by shilohbucher at October 29, 2001 11:47 AM