The Kyoto treaty has failed, and it's failed even in Europe, which has had cap and tax since 2005.
Perhaps - and this goes for the Kyoto School too - one of these insights is that nothingness and unknowing don't have to be equated with a destructive nihilism but with the experience of unity and participation - whilst resisting the tendency of objectifying metaphysics to claim that we can in some way 'know' that this experienced unity is really the truth of how things are, i. e. , reveals being itself.
When we walk away from global warming, Kyoto, when we are irresponsibly slow in moving toward AIDS in Africa, when we don't advance and live up to our own rhetoric and standards, we set a terrible message of duplicity and hypocrisy.
The Kyoto Treaty wasn't perfect, but we signed it, in fact, helped to draft it. And I'm very proud of it, it was the world's first commitment to doing something comprehensive on greenhouse gases and trying to reduce global warming before we do irreversible damage to many civilizations around the world.
The Kyoto treaty. . . has no scientific foundation
It will be nearly impossible to slow warming appreciably without condemning much of the world to poverty unless energy sources that emit little or no carbon dioxide become competitive with conventional fossil fuels.
The Administration should never have walked away from the Kyoto Treaty. Global warming is real and it is here today. The facts aren't the issue. The policy is the issue. I think the Administration's policy on global warming is dead wrong.
The United States did not sign Kyoto, yet its emissions are not that different from the countries that did sign it.
To put that into some perspective, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore had first taken the idea of the Kyoto Protocol up to the Congress, the United States Senate voted it down 95 to nothing.
I do not believe there is an atheist in the world who would bulldoze Mecca-or Chartres, York Minster or Notre Dame, the Shwe Dagon, the temples of Kyoto or, of course, the Buddhas of Bamiyan.
Kyoto was a flawed process. There isn't one industrialized country around the world that has ratified that treaty, and so that is a non-starter.
The U. S. withdrawal from the Kyoto protocol endangers the entire process.
Kyoto costs a lot, does nothing to prevent calamity, and pays no compensation in the event of loss. If my insurance broker offered that sort of policy, I would not carry insurance. Instead what my broker offers is a policy that costs a little and pays full compensation in the event of loss. If someone wants to propose that as a policy on global warming, I'm all in favour.
I'm not against Kyoto. I just think it's a fantasy, especially considering China's energy predicament and their coal supplies.
The bottom line for Canada is that Kyoto will precipitate a recession that will cause a permanent reduction in employment, income and the size of our economy. And if global warming is going to happen Kyoto will do nothing whatsoever to prevent it or even slow it down. Why are we still considering it?
Kyoto is likely to yield far less than the targeted emissions reduction. That failure will most likely be papered over with creative accounting, shifting definitions of carbon sinks, and so on. If this happens, the credibility of the international process for addressing climate change will be at risk.
Even meeting Kyoto targets barely makes a dent in what we have to achieve.
When the Kyoto Protocol enters into the force tomorrow, the world will take a significant and long-awaited first step towards stemming global warming. Instead of stepping forward as the world leader on climate change, however, the Bush Administration is clinging to the role of world obstructionist.
An accomplished woman is one who has a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing and the modern languages; she must be well trained in the fighting styles of the Kyoto masters and the modern tactics and weaponry of Europe.
The different policies reduce damages by only a modest amount. Indeed, one of the surprises is how little the policies affect the damages from global warming. The reasons are that, because there is so much inertia in the climate system and because the Protocol reduced the global temperature increase by only a fraction of a degree over the next century.
