Apropos of our "Crichton Envy" discussion...

… below… is this excellent article–The Kyoto Protocol is Dead— by Reason’s Ron Bailey.

The conventional wisdom that it’s the United States against the rest of the world in climate change diplomacy has been turned on its head. Instead it turns out that it is the Europeans who are isolated. China, India, and most of the rest of the developing countries have joined forces with the United States to completely reject the idea of future binding GHG emission limits. At the conference here in Buenos Aires, Italy shocked its fellow European Union members when it called for an end to the Kyoto Protocol in 2012. These countries recognize that stringent emission limits would be huge barriers to their economic growth and future development.

Reading his piece, I was struck by how much Kyoto has suffered in my (and probably others’) eyes in the post-Oil-for-Food scandal environment. How do you trust nations like France and Germany to follow the documents they sign in the first place? Their motives seem so much more political than enviromental.

Bailey tells we are headed for a dual approaches in the post-Kyoto world:

Two different but complementary paths for addressing any future climate change have emerged from the Buenos Aires Climate Change Conference. The Europeans and activists have been pushing the first, which envisions steep near term reductions (next 20 years) in the emissions of GHG as a way to mitigate projected global warming. On the other hand, the United States has been advocating a technology-push approach in which emissions continue to rise and then GHG concentrations and emissions are cut steeply beginning in about 20 years.