11 September,2009 09:06 AM IST | | PTI
A US lawmaker has urged his colleagues in the Congress to watch Oscar-winning "Slumdog Millionaire" to get a sense of how the United States is dealing with on the issue of climate change.
"I want to just ask what is, if we had two scenarios, which one would be better for the United States, one scenario where India, let us say those people who are now living with a piece of plastic stretched over their head on a piece of bamboo and maybe one shirt to their name".
They wake up in the morning and try to figure out where they're going to get water and when you talk to those people, that is what they say," Congressman Jay Inslee said in his remarks before the House Select Committee for Energy Independence and Global Warming.
"What's the first thing you do when you get up, when you wake up?" They said, "I try to find some water to drink. Then maybe I try to find some food to eat." And there's 300 (million) to 500 million of those people live that way.
And now we are asking them they need to act, but the question is what," Inslee said.
"So here is two scenarios, One scenario where those folks agree to a cap, the same cap that we have in the United States, per person. They agree with us. They will never emit more than we will todaY," he said, adding their emissions would go up by a factor of 10 per person if they did that.
"They would still agree to a cap, but it wouldn't do us any good. Or a situation where we demand and receive vigorous investments by them, vigorous changes in their regulatory structure, vigorous changes in their transportation infrastructure, vigorous efficiency standards in their building some of which some of them have done," Inslee said.
"Of those two scenarios, my view would be an agreement where we win agreements by developing world to take action, including China, as opposed to a cap which might be so high that they never actually ever do anything until the world is already destroyed, I'll take the action rather than the cap," Inslee said.
