Say goodbye to Kyoto

Tech Central Station has an article today discussing Prime Minister Tony Blair's comments about the Kyoto Treaty during his speech at the Clinton Global Initiative. As reported in the article:

Blair, a longtime supporter of the Kyoto treaty, further prefaced his remarks by noting, "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.

It's always nice to see a politician acknowledge reality when he or she sees it, because the Kyoto Treaty really has been a failure. If you guessed that the major failure of the Kyoto Treaty has nothing to do with Earth's climate or global warming, you win a gold star. The real purpose of the Kyoto Treaty was never to produce any type of comprehensive solution of the problem of global warming, but to make it easier for the much more restrictive treaties needed to address global warming to be ratified in the future. As the article makes clear, Prime Minister Blair now apparently believes that all such future treaties are guarenteed to fail.

There is another inference that one can draw from this article. From a practical point of view, ratification of the Kyoto Treaty by the United States will depend upon the strength of its proponents over the next several years. Many conservatives can certainly be pleased that Prime Minister Blair thinks that pro-Kyoto politicians will not have the abilitity to force ratification by the Kyoto Treaty's 2012 expiration data. On the other hand, I'm sure that this won't be pleasant news for a certain "national greatness conservative" who is President Bush's intraparty rival.