[DanST4]

Hey I have an idea - let's do something, anything! Let's finally adopt Kyoto - that would help wouldn't it? Well, no, that would actually hurt yet you still hear the idiots harping about the US lack of participation!


In July 2005, the United States led Australia, China, India, Japan, and South Korea in forming an international partnership to address climate change in a scientifically based and economically sustainable manner.

The transformation in U.S. global leadership was punctuated in November 2005, when British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared Kyoto and any other treaty demanding mandatory emissions cuts dead. According to Blair, mandatory emissions cuts are implausible unless technology is developed to make emissions reductions economically sustainable and until mandatory cuts apply to such nations as China and India.


Shortcomings Evident

Why did this dramatic transformation occur? There are many reasons. Despite the self-righteous statements of European Union leaders, the EU is failing miserably in its attempt to cut greenhouse gas emissions and is far short of its Kyoto goals. At the same time, through public- and private-sector cooperation exemplified by a $100 million grant from ExxonMobil to the Stanford University-led Global Climate and Energy Project, the United States has cut its greenhouse gas emissions every year since its 2001 rejection of the Kyoto Protocol.

Over the past three years, EU carbon dioxide emissions have risen (despite a tumbling economy), while U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have fallen (during a period of steady economic growth).

While the EU scores public relations points by vowing carbon dioxide cuts that never reach fruition, the U.S. has invested in and reaped the benefits of new technologies that, for example, dramatically reduce emissions of methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

As the European economy stumbles under its Kyoto burden, energy-intensive industry is relocating to China, where the government refuses to cut greenhouse gas emissions and where the economy sizzles. As Blair and others have come to realize, all the promised cuts in European greenhouse gas emissions will fail to make any dent in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels if cuts in Western emissions are outweighed by corresponding increases in Chinese emissions.


EU Economy Endangered

The final blow to Europe's Kyoto delusions may have been the November 7 release of an international study predicting substantial harm to European economies that abide by their Kyoto promises. Putting still more pressure on the already-reeling European economy, Kyoto would spark an approximately 25 percent jump in electricity prices and a roughly 2 percent reduction in gross domestic product if Europe were to meet its reduction targets, which it has yet to do. Any additional cuts required after Kyoto expires in 2012 would be even more punitive economically.

Tony Blair and other world leaders have come to realize that if you love "That 70s Show," wait until you see a rerun of "That 70s Economy" throughout Europe if the EU fails to follow Bush's lead on global warming.



Bush Was Right to Reject Kyoto 'Fiasco'

George Bush suffered heavy international criticism for rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, but it now appears he was exactly right: The treaty is a "fiasco,” Forbes magazine declares. The treaty was negotiated in 1997 as a way to slow global warming, and formally took effect in February, without U.S. participation. The Clinton administration agreed to the protocol, but the Senate refused to ratify it, in part because developing countries that were major polluters and trade competitors, particularly China and India, refused to participate in the Kyoto accord. So right now "Kyoto is essentially a western European proposition,” Forbes reports. But "China and India together send more tons of carbon into the atmosphere than all of western Europe combined, and the U.S. accounts for more than China and India together.” Therefore it has become "painfully obvious that the treaty was a fiasco,” Dan Seligman writes in Forbes. Even Britain’s Tony Blair, a supporter of the protocol, seemed to admit defeat for the treaty when in a recent speech at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York, he conceded: "No country is going to cut growth” – which is the only known way to cut emissions, according to Forbes.

Ironically, even western Europe is not reducing emissions. According to the protocol, western European nations must reduce their emissions to levels 8 percent lower than those of 1990. But in the years since the treaty was negotiated, carbon dioxide levels increased by 7 percent in France, 11 percent in Italy and 29 percent in Spain. Overall, the increase for western Europe was 5.4 percent.

"After many years of European chatter about the monstrous evil perpetrated by George W. Bush in rejecting Kyoto,” Forbes concludes, "it is of possible interest that the increase in carbon emissions in the U.S. during those years was slightly lower (4.7 percent).”