Kyoto: kaput! [...again...]

The National Post (Nov.29, 2011) wrote in "Say it: Kyoto is dead":
"Shed no tears for the Kyoto Protocol: It was doomed to failure from the get-go. Scores of countries signed the 1997 global-warming treaty, but its carbon-emission limitations were binding only on the very richest of them. The world's two largest emitters - China and the United States - refused to accept any limits. Even most of the nations of Europe, whose leaders spoke of Kyoto's provisions as holy writ, never made the hard economic sacrifices necessary to meet their commitments. To get under their limits, they relied on accounting gimmicks, such as artificially low emission benchmarks dating from the coal-belching Cold War period.
Environmentalists imagine that Kyoto was a sort of bonding moment for the world's nations. In fact, it was an exercise in multilateral cynicism, with each group of nations tying to extract advantage through green posturing. The developing countries, including China, were happy that the treaty would handcuff the industrialized world's economic expansion until they caught up. The Europeans wanted it set up in such a way that they could boast
about their environmental bona fides without doing anything. And the Russians wanted everyone else to be bound by CO 2 limits because they had plenty of unused emission credits they wanted to sell for billions to guilt-ridden Western governments. No one was willing to make the massive, economy crippling measures that would be required to actually reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, such as replacing cheap carbon-based fuel en masse with more expensive renewable fuels.
Even if all the world's nations had somehow found some magical method for meeting their emission limits, the most the environmental treaty could have accomplished would have been to delay the total 21stcentury warming projected by scientists by a decade or less. The Earth would have warmed as much under Kyoto, just at a slightly slower rate.
All of which to say: We aren't distressed by rumours that Canada will soon withdraw from the protocol. Indeed, we hope those rumours are true. Since no Canadian government - either Liberal or Conservative - ever made any serious effort to cut emissions in compliance with our treaty obligations, there will be no effect in terms of actual energy policy in this country. And as noted above, even if there were, it wouldn't make much of a difference. The only effect of abandoning Kyoto would be that we would be striking a blow for intellectual honesty over cynical green flag-waving.
We would not be alone in effectively rejecting Kyoto. The Americans never ratified the treaty: Democrats and Republicans both refused in nearly equal numbers to hobble their economy with unrealistic emission reduction targets. The Australians followed suit in 2002, announcing that there was no way they would ratify, because doing so would hurt the economy. The Japanese voted to "accept" (but not ratify) Kyoto's reduction targets, then passed a law announcing those targets would not be legally binding either on companies or consumers.
Kyoto runs out next year. And the upcoming Durban summit has little hope of achieving a worldwide eco-treaty to succeed it. World leaders have lost all their 1997-era illusions about their ability to escape coal and oil, and about the motivations of the other members of the community of nations. Plus, a weak global economy (far weaker than it was in 1997) has destroyed any appetite for painful green initiatives among middle-class voters in countries such as Canada and the United States.
The hubristic idea that Canada has some critical role to play in saving the Kyoto process, which has been promoted in the Canadian media in recent days, is silly and naïve - a pathetic vestige of the 1990s-era soft-power fantasy that we could change the world through moral suasion. Kyoto will die whatever Canada does. No one in Washington or Beijing truly cares much whether we stay or go, whatever this or that press release may claim.
Many columnists in this newspaper have expressed skepticism regarding the scientific consensus that global warming is real, that it is caused in large part by the emission of green house gases by human economic activity, and that this presents a major problem that the world will have to deal with in coming generations. But even if one accepts the science behind Kyoto, the last 14 years demonstrate that top-down emission-reductions are not the answer. To the extent Prime Minister Stephen Harper has the courage to say this publicly, and formally withdraw from Kyoto, he should get credit for admitting a hard truth that other world leaders know, but will not admit."
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Let's remember that Liberal Jean Chretien was Canada's chief federal kyodiot; and let's remember that Good Ole Greenshevist Liberal MPP Jim Bradley was happily spreading his GreenFear on the provincial level throughout Ontario - even though Bradley had never publicly revealed which specific "global-warming evidence" compelled him to believe that socialism will 'cure' AGW!
After several decades of GreenFear agitation, Liberal Jim Bradley is still keeping his "global warming" evidence secret!!
So, let's hear Dalton McGuinty's deceptive Liberal Environment Minister Jim Bradley now bitterly complain about Kyoto's obituary (...and no, that's not about Stephane Bumbledore Dion's dog...)
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