And there's more... The PM does some straight talking on the Kyoto Treaty, and hardly anyone - apart from Tech Central Station - seems to notice :
Onstage with former president Bill Clinton at a midtown Manhattan hotel ballroom, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he was going to speak with "brutal honesty" about Kyoto and global warming, and he did...
"My thinking has changed in the past three or four years." So what does he think now? "No country, he declared, "is going to cut its growth." That is, no country is going to allow the Kyoto treaty, or any other such global-warming treaty, to crimp -- some say cripple -- its economy.
Looking ahead to future climate-change negotiations, Blair said of such fast-growing countries as India and China, "They're not going to start negotiating another treaty like Kyoto." India and China, of course, weren't covered by Kyoto in the first place, which was one of the fatal flaws in the treaty. But now Blair is acknowledging the obvious: that after the current Kyoto treaty -- which the US never acceded to -- expires in 2012, there's not going to be another worldwide deal like it.
So what will happen instead? Blair answered: "What countries will do is work together to develop the science and technology….There is no way that we are going to tackle this problem unless we develop the science and technology to do it." Bingo! That's what eco-realists have been saying all along, of course... Interestingly, these words from Blair, addressing an audience of a thousand at the Sheraton just a few blocks north of Times Square, failed to get any pickup in the media.
Via Iain Murray, who adds this footnote:
Blair had been an outspoken champion of the targets-and-timetables approach. The fact that he is now essentially repudiating the idea that there will ever be any such thing as a Kyoto Part II is actually very big news, and Blair, like it or not, should be commended for seeing the light on this.
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