Iain Murray says that it was French intransigence that killed the Kyoto treaty. His history on this rings true, as he remembers several things I remember well, but that everyone else seems to have forgotten.
Now, honestly, I don't care. I am highly skeptical about global warming in several ways: I'm not sure it's real, and if it is real, I'm not convinced that it's a bad thing. I'm definitely not convinced that Kyoto would have done anything significant to stop it.
Before you snap my head off, you should first be aware that thousands of qualified scientists feel the same way about the global warming issue. They may be wrong, of course. But so can those of you who believe so fervently, so passionately, that global warming is a looming catastrophic threat.
Honestly, I'm glad that the French, along with the Clinton administration, killed Kyoto. It's just interesting to me how certain people portray this as evil Republicans crushing the environment "again." Rather than telling the simple truth: Kyoto ended with the Clinton administration, mostly due to the rigid and inflexible French.
(Via Dodd.)
I linked that one the other day and the 'Ranting Rationalist' said: "This story makes me sad. I really liked the idea that the US killed the treaty."
Got a bit of a chuckle out of that.
Dean,
Even if global warming is real, I agree, the only significant effect will be making orchids easier to grow up north. I think that this is good. It's already too cold in upstate New York. :-)
Bad treaties, like bad legislation, are bad even when they make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I agree with Chris: even if you believe in the most dire global warming predictions, Kyoto would not have really helped you out. It was feel-good legislation on a global level that would have had a horrible economic impact on any country foolish enough to adopt and live by it.
But if the truth got out, how could Dems fund raise, since we all know its evil republicans that are a threat to small children and animals. Seriously, global warming is a big marketing lie, I still remember the breathless headlines in Time magazine chronicling the coming ice age. They can't predict weather further than 24 hours away and sometimes get that wrong. How can you honestly believe these same people can predict a rise in earths temperature?
To be fair, large-scale trends are much easier to predict than small-scale trends because so many local sources of noise average out over time. I can't tell you exactly what the stock market will do today, but I can tell you that over the next fifty years it will almost certainly trend upward.
The bigger problem I have with environmentalism is that today's green movement is more about politics than science, by which I mean it has been largely co-opted by anti-corporate types who see corporations (not environmental catastrophe) as the real danger and environmentalism as another tool for convincing the public that corporations are evil. They're aligned more closely with socialism than with science.
Geez Dean. You're acting as if George Bush somehow wasn't responsible for that 1999 Senate vote, 98-0, that effectively Kyoto in the U.S.
Actually, scientists who support Kyoto also say that Kyoto would have little effect. The way they phrase it is, "Kyoto is a necessary first step." We need, they say, 10 or more Kyotos.