The Kyoto Treaty Is Dead–I Knew That
Protein Wisdom (HT Amy Ridenour) pronounces the Kyoto Treaty dead. Congrats for giving this fact wider coverage.
With all due respects, though, the funeral was two months ago, as noted by Jim Pinkerton (my post on Pinkerton’s announcement of last rites is here). It was just not given adequate notice by the wishful enviros of the world:
Tony Blair Pulls the Plug on Kyoto at Clinton Summit
September 16, 2005Kyoto Treaty RIP. That’s not the headline in any newspaper this morning emerging from the first day of the Clinton Global Initiative, but it could have been — and should have been.
Onstage with former president Bill Clinton at a midtown Manhattan hotel ballroom, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he was going to speak with “brutal honesty” about Kyoto and global warming, and he did. And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had some blunt talk, too.
Blair, a longtime supporter of the Kyoto treaty, further prefaced his remarks by noting, “My thinking has changed in the past three or four years.” So what does he think now? “No country,” he declared, “is going to cut its growth.” That is, no country is going to allow the Kyoto treaty, or any other such global-warming treaty, to crimp — some say cripple — its economy.
Looking ahead to future climate-change negotiations, Blair said of such fast-growing countries as India and China, “They’re not going to start negotiating another treaty like Kyoto.”
The UK Guardian article Jeff at Protein Wisdom cites essentially calls the above verbiage from Tony Blair two months ago a “hint.”
If that’s a hint, my saying that Ronald Reagan was the greatest president of the last half of the 20th century is a “hint” that I sort of liked what he did.
Margaret Beckett’s attempt to work out “voluntary standards” is noteworthy, in that it is the first formal evidence that Blair’s acknwledgment of reality is being carried out. But the carcass of Kyoto has thankfully been in the ground for some time.
