President Bush v. The Kyoto Protocol: Bush Wins

There is a great article in the Wall Street Journal, which I found via my subscription to Babalu Blog (if you haven’t subscribed, add this link to your reader). It seems there has been a change of opinion in the world concerning the Kyoto Protocol.

It seems that President Bush’s plan works better:

The headline was that the nations pledged to cut global greenhouse emissions by half by 2050. Yet for the first time, the G-8 also agreed that any meaningful climate program would have to involve industrializing nations like China and India. For the first time, too, the G-8 agreed that real progress will depend on technological advancements. And it agreed that the putative benefits had to justify any brakes on economic growth.

In other words, the G-8 signed on to what has been the White House approach since 2002. The U.S. has relied on the arc of domestic energy programs now in place, like fuel-economy standards and efficiency regulations, along with billions in subsidies for low-carbon technology. Europe threw in with the central planning of the Kyoto Protocol — and the contrast is instructive. Between 2000 and 2006, U.S. net greenhouse gas emissions fell 3%. Of the 17 largest world-wide emitters, only France reduced by more.

So despite environmentalist sanctimony about the urgent need for President Bush and the U.S. to “take the lead” on global warming, his program has done better than most everybody else’s.

The article also shows what I have been saying since the blog was started: Kyoto is not only a failure, it is socialism:

The irony is that Kyoto has handed them every reason not to participate. Europe knew all along that it couldn’t meet its quotas, so it created an out in “offsets.” A British factory, say, buys a credit to pay for basic efficiency improvements in a Chinese coal plant, like installing smokestack scrubbers. This is a tax on the Brits to make Chinese industries more competitive. Sweet deal if you can get it.

It gets worse. The offsets are routed through a U.N. bureaucracy that makes them far more valuable in Europe than the cost of the actual efficiency improvements. So far, Kyoto-world has paid more than €4.7 billion to eliminate an obscure greenhouse gas called HFC-23; the necessary incinerators cost less than €100 million. Most of the difference in such schemes goes to the foreign government, such as China’s communist regime.

Go ahead and hold your breath waiting to hear this news on the evening news, or read about it in the newspapers.