James Pinkerton, Tech Central Station;
Kyoto 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.” India and China, of course, weren’t covered by Kyoto in the first place, which was one of the fatal flaws in the treaty. But now Blair is acknowledging the obvious: that after the current Kyoto treaty — which the US never acceded to — expires in 2012, there’s not going to be another worldwide deal like it.
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So what will happen instead? Blair answered: “What countries will do is work together to develop the science and technology�.There is no way that we are going to tackle this problem unless we develop the science and technology to do it.” Bingo! That’s what eco-realists have been saying all along, of course — that the only feasible way to deal with the issue of greenhouse gases and global warming is through technological breakthroughs, not draconian cutbacks.
Blair concluded with a rhetorical question-and-answer: “How do we move forward, post- Kyoto? It can only be done by the major players coming together and pooling their resources, to find their way to come together.”
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Interestingly, these words from Blair, addressing an audience of a thousand at the Sheraton just a few blocks north of Times Square, failed to get any pickup in the media. Even The New York Times, published just down the street, ran a story that dwelt on the star power in the room, including King Abdullah of Jordan, Jesse Jackson, and George Stephanopoulos. “Isn’t this awesome?” said one participant, and those words seemed to reflect fully the Times’ take on the event.
H/T to Maz2 in the comments.
While it is possible that human beings have had an effect on global warming, that warming has been taking place, with some occasional temporary excursions of a few centuries duration, for the last 13,000 years as we have been coming out of the last ice age — and we aren’t all the way out yet. At best we may have accelerated said trend by a century at most.
In the mean time there are documented increases in temperature over many decades on Mars, Pluto and Triton (the biggest moon of Neptune) — and Pluto has been moving AWAY from the sun. I guess man must be causing global warming on other planets as well with our evil oil-burning ways.