Pirate's Cove

Seems as if Tony Blair is finally getting the fact the the Kyoto Protocol just doesn’t work.

"I’m changing my thinking about this in the past two or three years. I think if we are going to get action, we have got to start from the brutal honesty about the politics of how we deal with it," Mr. Blair said.

"The truth is, no country is going to cut its growth or consumption substantially in the light of a long-term environmental problem.

That is the truth. And that is what Kyoto mandated. No wonder the Senate voted overwhelmingly against it in 1999. And neither Clinton nor Bush 43 pushed it.

The Bush administration now agrees that human activity is responsible for global warming, but Mr. Blair’s remarks are likely to shift the focus to the treaty itself.

The treaty imposed severe constraints on industrial nations, especially those outside Western Europe, while imposing no restrictions on big polluters such as China and India.

The treaty was so flawed, said many critics, that if implemented it would have increased global emissions of so-called greenhouse gases more than if there had been no treaty at all.

Mr. Blair predicted that Kyoto, which expires in 2012, would not have a successor treaty, but said the solution to global warming would be to introduce incentives for large-scale energy users to make cutbacks.

Whether you believe in global warming or not, pollution is not in doubt. Rather then being restrictive, why not give some sort of incentives to develop less expensive and easier to implement measures to clean waste? Guess that just wouldn’t make sense to governement.