Monday, November 28, 2005

United Nations Montreal Climate Summit

A climate summit will be held in Montreal in February. This is first U.N. climate conference to be held since Kyoto went into effect. Read the BBC story here.

"The one thing that we don't want to see, and cannot afford, is to allow this US administration to hold the rest of the world hostage, while they go on about voluntary this and voluntary that, which doesn't in the end produce anything." Steve Sawyer of Greenpeace.

To set the stage, Al Gore went to Kyoto and met with various NGO's like the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace although, I don't recall hearing anything about whether he met with the actual energy producers. He then negotiated the abomination known as Kyoto, which put a huge burden for carbon dioxide reduction on the developed nations and left China, India and Africa completely off the hook. The U.S. Senate recognizing that the US would pay an unfair burden, refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and President Clinton refused to promote it. Can you imagine that. The Vice President crafts the greatest environmental treaty of the 20th century and his President refuses to endorse it? The left wing media pretty much ignored that angle as Clinton and Gore were given a pass by the MSM. Instead, George Bush became the scapegoat and the Europeans and the NGO's have been blaming Bush ever since. Interestingly, the Euros have already failed to meet their Kyoto carbon dioxide reduction targets and have found that it will cost them a lot of money to do so. So now, someone wants to drag everyone back to the negotiating table, where the extremists can find a new way to bind the participants to mandated reductions.

We already know who one of the interested parties is: Greenpeace.

It will be interesting to find out who the other players are and what they have in mind.

1 comment:

Tiger said...

I had an argument once with a co-worker about global warming, the main (public) point of the Kyoto Treaty. Upon bringing up scientific evidence that GW was climatic in nature, not produced by the generational activities of mankind, and that, in fact, to some degree (pardon the pun), GW occurs on Pluto as well as Earth - he promptly shouted, "I don't care! It's America's fault anyway!".

: )