Word: kyoto
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...including nuclear.) And in his big Portland speech, he ducked one of the central issues of the entire climate debate: how to get China on board. There are really only three options for this. First, the U.S. commits to emission reductions and figures out China later. That's the Kyoto option, and it was dead on arrival a decade ago. Second, there's the China trapdoor: America refuses to have a carbon cap unless China does too. That's a non-starter for China, since the U.S. has been spewing C02 for more than a century, and virtually...
...rest has actually provided a greater degree of systemic stability to the world,” he said. “The rise of the rest,” Zakaria added, is also inextricably tied to U.S. environmental policies. He cited America’s rejection to sign the Kyoto Protocol as an instance in which “sometimes even George Bush is right.” “If you don’t include India and China, the treaty is not worth the paper it’s printed on,” Zakaria said...
...Kyoto isn't working. As the European Commission itself admits, western Europe is likely to miss its Kyoto targets. So is Japan. Carbon trading is widely acknowledged as a failure. The first phase of the E.U.'s Emission Trading Scheme did not produce either a workable market in carbon or reduced emissions. Global warming has become a new religion, with the Kyoto Protocol as one of its articles of faith. The idea that we can control a global climate governed by a billion factors by dickering with a couple of politically selected gases is carbon claptrap. Leon Wilbanks, Salem, Oregon...
...carbon-cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions over time. Gingrich, true to his GOP roots, advocates private market incentives to encourage the development and dissemination of alternative energy technology, like a $1 billion prize for creating a workable hydrogen-powered car engine. In his view a Kyoto Protocol-style policy will never work, largely because the developing countries like India and China will never sign on to a plan that might hamper their exploding economies. Instead our only hope is to advance low-carbon technologies that are good enough to save the climate and cheap enough...
Gingrich is right to point out the flaws of the Kyoto Protocol, and to emphasize the need for rapid and drastic technological change. But I think he underplays the degree of government involvement, and the value of a hard carbon cap. If the private market could come up with a workable solution to climate change, well, presumably it would have by now. The reality is that the government will likely need to play a very large role in balancing global warming, and that very fact could turn off conservatives. But for all their talk of small government, most conservatives have...