Economic Activity and the Greenhouse Effect

Global warming is recognized as one of the most important issues in international politics, although specialists are still uncertain about the role which various socio-economic factors play in global warming under a variety of conditions. Among the factors examined in this paper, the burning of fossil fuels bears the greatest responsibility for global CO2 emissions. Given the growth in emissions in the LDCs, global action to regulate emissions cannot be effective without their full participation and therefore north-south problems need to be addressed simultaneously, or before, the problem of global warming. The problem of global warming is becoming ever more urgent as energy demand has begun to increase again following the collapse of oil prices in 1986.