So what’s to talk about at Cancun now?

By Andrew Bolt

The country which named the treaty doesn’t want it renewed. Full stop:

The world’s climate negotiations in Cancun were faced with deadlock at their outset yesterday after Japan insisted it would not agree to renewing the Kyoto Protocol, the current treaty under which rich countries are cutting their emissions of greenhouse gases.

Kyoto, signed in the Japanese city in 1997, runs out in its current form at the end of 2012, yet its renewal carries enormous symbolic significance for the developing countries – who see it as a sign of good faith by industrialised nations in the fight against global warming – and who are not legally bound by it, as the rich countries are.

Richer countries, led by the European Union and US, would like to replace Kyoto with a treaty that brings all the world’s countries into a legally binding pact to cut carbon emissions.

It was over this difference that negotiations collapsed at the UN climate conference in Copenhagen last December…

Japan takes the view that it will not agree once more to be legally bound to cut back on its emissions while its economic competitors – China, India and Indonesia (and also the US, which withdrew from Kyoto in 2001) – are not.

But of course.

In Japan’s first statement to the conference, Jun Arima from the ministry of economics, trade and industry insisted Japan wanted “a new single binding instrument with the participation of all major emitters”. He said: “Japan will not inscribe its target under the Kyoto Protocol on any conditions or under any circumstances… Discussions focusing on a second commitment period will go nowhere.”

Sounds definitive to me. So India and China won’t sign a deal which restricts their emissions, and the US and Japan won’t sign one that won’t.

And still we hear this babble in Australia about an international deal being in the offing.

Andrew Bolt is a journalist and columnist writing for The Herald Sun in Melbourne Victoria Australia.

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Andrew Bolt’s columns appear in Melbourne’s Herald Sun, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph and Adelaide’s Advertiser. He runs the most-read political blog in Australia and is a regular commentator on Channel 9′s Today show and ABC TV’s Insiders. He will be heard from Monday to Friday at 8am on the breakfast show of new radio station MTR 1377, and his book Still Not Sorry remains very widely read.

Tagged: Andrew Bolt, Cancun Climate Change Conference, Climate Change Religion, Climate Change Scaremongering, Global Warming Alarmism, Global Warming Hype, The Kyoto Protocol, Tony

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