China Sends Global Warming Ransom Note

China has now destroyed Western hopes for a new global warming agreement, just weeks before global talks in Poland aimed at writing a successor for the Kyoto Protocol— which expires in 2012. China has attached a ransom note to its Polish meeting RSVP: They might go along with a new warming pact if the rich countries agree to hand over 1 percent of their GDP—about $300 billion per year—to finance the required non-fossil, higher-cost energy systems the West wants the developing countries to use.

China, India, Brazil, and Mexico had already demanded—in July— that the developed countries cut their emissions by 80–95 percent by 2050. Very unlikely... [snip]

The EU has loudly boasted of trying to set an 80-percent cut in its emissions, but that now looks impossible. Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Greece are part of a “blocking force” saying says they can’t afford to give up coal and oil. Especially when the only alternative is imported Russian gas; Russia recently “invaded” Georgia, many think to stop Georgian efforts to build a gas pipeline that would have competed with Russia’s.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who helped create the Kyoto Protocol, now says that drastic cuts in CO2 emissions are “ill-advised climate policy.” She’s building 26 brown-coal power plants instead, and re-thinking the German promise to scuttle its nuclear power plants.

Don’t spend much of your “worry time” on a new climate treaty however. Global temperatures are doing their best to tell us that CO2 isn’t very important after all...

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