Ho Hum! Ho Hum!

More on Al Gore and Kyoto. Is it any wonder that while "global warming" is the BK Flavour Of The Day people are not walking the talk. The refrain today seems to be; "I will do my part to stop global warming as long as it doesn't inconvenience me."

Gore's hypocrisy exposed
By LORRIE GOLDSTEIN
May 17, 2007

What's this? Global warming guru Al Gore caught on tape refusing to endorse the Kyoto accord? Yep.

In his recent special, Exposed: The Climate of Fear, CNN's Glenn Beck showed some priceless footage of then vice-president Gore explaining in 1997 why he didn't support U.S. participation in the Kyoto accord.

"We will not submit this (Kyoto) for ratification until there's meaningful participation by key developing nations" Gore said.

Problem is, Kyoto required nothing of developing countries such as China and India when Gore made that statement 10 years ago, doesn't require anything of them now and won't require anything of them before it expires in 2012.

As Christopher Horner, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, dryly observes in Beck's report:

"That's the Gore standard. That standard still has not been met. That was the standard George Bush articulated, too, but he's mean."

Indeed, it's utterly hypocritical for Gore to now condemn Bush and Prime Minister Stephen Harper for refusing to implement Kyoto.

If it was so important, why didn't Gore and his then-boss Bill Clinton, who signed Kyoto in November 1998, take the vital step of sending it to Congress for ratification, thus making the treaty effective?

After all, they had more than two years left in Clinton's presidency to do so.

The reason is the U.S. Senate had already made it clear a year earlier, in a bipartisan vote of 95-0, that it wouldn't ratify Kyoto.

Democrats and Republicans alike thought it was unfair to U.S. economic interests due to its lack of demands on the developing world.

That's still Bush's position, the same one Gore had a decade ago. But Gore has since changed his tune, even though the stumbling block he cited in 1997 hasn't changed.

The argument of the developed nations that ratified Kyoto, including Canada, was that we would make our emission cuts first, thus winning the trust of the developing world for the post-Kyoto round of greenhouse gas reductions after 2012.

According to the science, we need 10 to 18 times the cuts Kyoto calls for over the next few decades to stop man-made global warming.

But post-Kyoto talks are stumbling because the developing world, led by China, is balking at significant cuts. They argue, with considerable justification, that since the developed world is responsible for 85% of greenhouse gas emissions to date, it's unfair to ask the developing world to make major cuts now, which will slow their economic growth.

The problem is that post-Kyoto, developing nations will be responsible for most emissions. China will pass the U.S. as the world's worst emitter as early as this year.

The developing world will pass the developed in annual emissions within the next decade or two.

Both the U.S. and China have to climb down from their stands of waiting for the other to blink, if progress is to be made.

As for Canada, we're in no position to lecture anyone.

Not the Americans, since while we ratified Kyoto and they didn't, we did a worse job of controlling our emissions than they did.

And not the Chinese, since we're 35% over our Kyoto target. Some example.

Of course, the U.S. and China could always do what we did.

They could agree to emission cuts -- and then ignore them.