A major Greenie fortress crumbles

"Nature" magazine is the house-journal of the Warmists so their publication of the article below is a big deal -- particularly since they are now parroting the line of -- no, no, it can't be true -- GEORGE BUSH!

TWO British experts have backed the Australian and US governments' refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, saying emissions caps are the wrong tool for tackling the problem. "Time to ditch Kyoto," British social scientist Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics and leading climate change researcher Steve Rayner of Oxford University, who holds dual US-British citizenship, wrote in the journal Nature. "The Kyoto Protocol is a symbolically important expression of governments' concern about climate change. But as an instrument for achieving emissions reductions, it has failed," they wrote. They said the world should instead raise spending on clean energy research to tens of billions of dollars a year as part of a broader plan "on a wartime footing"....

The two urged governments to consider carrying out more research instead of tightening Kyoto-style caps. The world's environment ministers will meet in Bali, Indonesia, from December 3-14 to launch negotiations on a successor to Kyoto. "Investment in energy research and development should be placed on a wartime footing," the experts wrote of efforts to create clean energy such as wind and solar power. "It seems reasonable to expect the world's leading economies and emitters to devote as much money to this challenge as they currently spend on military research - in the case of the United States, about $80 billion a year," they said....

Mr Prins and Mr Rayner noted that many Kyoto backers had criticised President George W. Bush for bringing major emitters together for talks in Washington last month. But such talks may be a necessary first step to a broader deal, they said. Mr Bush rejected Kyoto in 2001, saying its emissions caps would be too costly and that Kyoto wrongly omitted goals for poor nations. Kyoto backers see it as a tiny first step to slow the effects of climate change such as more floods, heatwaves and rising seas.

But Ben McNeill from the Climate Change Centre at the University Of New South Wales defended Kyoto today, saying the clean development mechanism and targets were important keys to slowing global warming. "Emissions targets dictate for example how effective a carbon emissions trading scheme is. In other words a carbon trading price, and that's a very important part of our strategy in the next decade or so to reduce carbon emissions and combat global warming," Dr McNeill told Radio Australia.

The two experts said the world should create markets in greenhouse gases but efforts so far had failed to produce stable prices high enough to spur a major shift away from the fossil fuels widely blamed for causing global warming. They said that, instead of ordering deeper Kyoto-style cuts in emissions beyond 2012, countries should develop policies only after experimenting with various ideas. "Although a bottom-up approach may seem painfully slow and sprawling, it may be the only way to build credible institutions that markets endorse," they wrote.

Source


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