Saturday, September 17, 2005

The Death Of Naive Environmentalism

Jim Pinkerton reports: Tony Blair pulled the plug on Kyoto at Clinton Global Initiative.

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

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.

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.

(link courtesy: National Review Online)
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2 comments:

libertarian said...

Yup,

I like Bush. But his energy policy and the just-passed energy bill is a disaster. The cure-all - fuel-cell vehicles - is bogus - not going to see the light of commercial day for 15-20 years.

Here's a newsgroup that tells about 100mpg cars today for an additional $3000. Further, there are 4 million(!) cars/trucks in the U.S. today that are already certified for E85. Here's an NYTimes article. If you combine what calcars is doing and what the NYTimes talks about you get a 500mpg (gasoline) car. Just think of what language you can use with the Saudis when your oil consumption takes a decided dive :-)

India is already way ahead on the CNG band-wagon. Just needs to be scaled to all cities. I can attest that Bombay, in particular, has _much_ cleaner air as a result of the rickshaws all being converted to CNG (and some from 2-stroke to 4-stroke). There is definite economic incentive to do so - the price of CNG is half that of gas/petrol.

Yup, Kyoto's a non-starter. And the technology exists today. Question is , is the US government still going to bow to the oil lobby?

3:13 PM
libertarian said...

Just as an aside, E85 (mixture of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline) is close to CO2-neutral for the environment (the biggest green-house worry). The ethanol component usually comes from sugar (in Brazil and India) or corn (in the US) where the CO2 has been fixed from the air to grow the corn/sugar and is released back when burned in the vehicle.

3:19 PM

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