2 good reasons to do this. 1) the satellite they destroyed was in a polar orbit. The Russians have purposely blocked other countries from having an easy time surveilling their activities around the North Pole which they have been attempting to claim for some time. 2) creating a debris field in orbit from space junk is one relatively fast and cheap way to test if orbital material could be used to block the sun to remedy the effects of climate change.

Just a quick little estimate:

Earth's estimated population - 6,591,818,552.

1) Let's say 1/3 of the population is old enough to drive - 2,197,272,850.

2) Then, lets say 1/3 of those people own cars - 732,424,283. (NADA estimates are around 200 million vehicles in the US alone as of 1999)

3) Lets say that every one of those people use their car to drive 10 km per day (total baseless assumption).

4) The honda civic (arbitrary conservative choice) puts out 212g/km of co2. To do that, it uses intake air. co2 is formed from oxygen in the intake air during cumbustion and exhausted out the pipe. The o in co2 is that oxygen, so the engine is converting oxygen to co2.

That's 732,424,283 cars x (10km x 212g/km) = 1,552,739,479,960 grams of co2 produced everyday by our very conservative estimate

Shouldn't take us too long to produce a nice planet for some beings who breathe co2 and love it very hot. Might even look like Mars eventually.

oh - since I wrote this the population estimate is now 6,603,323,454.