Feulner: Kyoto's pointless promises

An excerpt for Ed Feulner's opinion piece Kyoto's pointless promises from the IndyStar:

China's CO2 emissions rose 8 percent last year, after jumping more than 11 percent in each of the two previous years. According to a Dutch study, China alone accounted for two-thirds of the growth in global greenhouse-gas emissions in 2007, and its current lead over the United States in such emissions is only expected to grow.

Contrast that with our environmental record.

The U.S. government estimates that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions increased by just 1.6 percent in 2007, after dropping 1.5 percent the year before. The growth in our emissions is less than the growth of our gross domestic product, meaning we've improved the economy while reducing the growth in our emissions.

And we're doing that without being part of the Kyoto treaty.

Indeed, few people would know this fact because the US is generally portrayed by the main stream media as the guilty culprit when it comes to emissions of so-called "greenhouse gases". More on the Kyoto Accord:

That 1997 agreement requires the 37 countries that signed it to slash emissions by a combined 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. But the treaty is a pipe dream. Instead of falling, the United Nations reported that such emissions are nearing "an all-time high." Greenhouse gas emissions from the Kyoto signers increased 2.6 percent between 2000 and 2005.

Yet we have seen no increase in world temperatures in the past ten years and scientists are now forcasting a period of global cooling lasting maybe one or two decades.

Signing Kyoto may allow a country to claim it's a good "global citizen," but many of those citizens aren't keeping their promises. The U.N. reports Kyoto signers Austria, New Zealand and Canada have all increased their emissions over 1990 levels -- by 14, 23 and 54 percent, respectively.

In fact, the U.N. admits that the only reason the world might meet Kyoto's goal (a 5 percent reduction from 1990 emissions levels by 2012) is because the economies of so many Eastern European economies collapsed when the Iron Curtain fell. In other words, only a domestic recession will allow the planet to hit Kyoto's target.

Feulner goes on to discuss the economics of Kyoto and the failure of the US congress to pass the Lieberman-Warner climate change bill because "it would slash our national GDP by at least $1.7 trillion by the year 2030".

Yet despite the failure of the majority of Kyoto's signatories to meet their emissions reductions targets, and despite the minimal effect on world temperatures that fully implemented Kyoto CO2 reductions would bring (0.07 degrees Celsius reduction in global temperatures by 2050), the world marches on toward Kyotocide with the UN leading the charge for a new "son of Kyoto" treaty which would reduce CO2 emissions even further.

I'll close with Feulner's final comment:

The world doesn't need a new Kyoto -- the treaty that accomplished nothing but takes the gold medal for uselessness and hypocrisy.