Free Republic

Take a wild guess what country is reducing its greenhouse gas emissions the most? Canada? Britain? France? India? Germany? Japan? No, no, no, no, no and no. The answer to that question is the U.S. of A. Wow! How can that be? This must be a misprint. Fake news. America never ratified the Kyoto Treaty some two decades ago. We never enacted a carbon tax. We don't have a cap-and-trade carbon emission program. That environmental villain Donald Trump pulled America out of the Paris climate accord that was signed by almost the entire rest of the civilized world. Yet the...

Bolivia blames capitalism Mexico: Bolivian President Evo Morales said capitalism was responsible for climate change in his speech at the Climate Change Summit Thursday and he insisted on the need for the developed countries to make new commitments to reduce their greenhouse effect gas emissions. “We are sometimes debating only the effects of global warming, and not the causes, and we should be responsible and debate those causes,” said the Bolivian President in the high level segment of the 16th Climatic Change Summit in Cancun. Morales recalled the responsibility of the Governments so that key decisions are adopted to face...

<p>It really happened. The NASA scientist who lit the bonfire of the global warming vanities with his flamboyant congressional testimony 14 years ago, has turned the hose on its dying embers.</p> <p>There is now no reason for the Bush administration to give an inch on climate change. Sure, energy efficient technologies (like my Honda hybrid) are worth exploring. But there is absolutely no scientific reason for any expensive policy like the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Mr. Bush led the world by being the first to walk away from Kyoto, and science has proven him correct.</p>

When the idiotic Kyoto Protocol was put before the US Senate, 95 senators voted against this confused and destructive initiative on the grounds that, as designed, the measure would simply ship American jobs to China and other countries without reducing greenhouse gasses. For years, green activists have mourned and bemoaned the shortsightedness of the US. How could we sit out from something so noble, so planet saving, so wise as the sacred Kyoto Protocol? We have been listening to the green moral scolds for twenty years: those fat, dumb and ignorant Americans are simply too stupid and too selfish to...

While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president. In 2000 and 2001, while Barack Obama served as a board member for a Chicago-based charitable foundation, he helped to fund a pioneering carbon trading exchange that is likely to fill a critical role in the controversial cap-and-trade carbon reduction scheme that President Obama is now trying to push rapidly through Congress. During those two years, the Joyce Foundation gave nearly...

Global climate change talks came to an end in Bangkok todayin an atmosphere of distrust and recrimination, with the rift between rich and poor countries seemingly wider than ever. snip . . . With five days of negotiating time left before the concluding talks in Copenhagen in December, delegates said it appeared a weak deal was the most likely outcome, and no deal at all was a possibility. snip . . . "The rift between rich and poor has intensified because rich countries have not put serious money on the table to help poor countries adapt to escalating impacts of...

Like other green-leaning Colorado cities, Boulder finds good intentions aren't enough to meet greenhouse-gas goals. Even for Boulder, an icon of earthy urban planning, saving the planet doesn't come easy. Faced with a looming deadline and lagging results in its efforts to cut carbon-dioxide emissions, city leaders recently vowed to redouble their efforts. The City Council earlier this month voted to raise the city's "carbon tax" — a charge based on how much electricity one consumes — to the maximum $21 per year for residences and $94 per year for businesses. And Boulderites aren't pikers. Many of the 20 or...

If Boulder is serious about meeting the goal it set in 2002 when city leaders agreed to meet the Kyoto Protocol -- reducing greenhouse gas emissions 7 percent below 1990 levels -- it's time for city officials to play hardball in their negotiations with Xcel Energy. That's the message a group of business, community and environmental leaders hope to convey to the Boulder City Council on Monday when they meet at the Stazio Ballfields to listen to speakers rally the crowd from a pile of faux coal. With the slender towers of the Valmont Coal Plant as a backdrop, the...

Japan on Wednesday sealed a deal to buy emissions rights from Ukraine, marking its first deal via a government-to-government trading scheme under the Kyoto Protocol and paving the way for another similar deal soon. Kiev will deliver 30 million tonnes of so-called Assigned Amount Units (AAUs) to Japan, with the sale's proceeds earmarked for six specific environmental measures in Ukraine, including renewable energy projects, the Japanese government said in a statement. The other five areas are energy conservation, utilisation of coal bed methane, shift to cleaner fuels, pollution reduction and reduction of other greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. The value...

Every attempt so far to get emissions under control turns out to be about money. Let's examine an important question. Are the major schemes created by global politicians to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, ostensibly to combat global warming, effective? The answer is no, because they aren't about addressing global warming. They're about making more money for governments and large corporations. Let's start with the Kyoto accord. Will it be effective in lowering global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions? No. It wasn't meant to be. Kyoto, a United Nations treaty, exempts the developing world -- 143 of 180 nations which ratified it...

OSLO, Dec 7 (Reuters) - Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore urged governments on Friday to advance by two years a new treaty to curb greenhouse gas emissions instead of waiting until the Kyoto pact expires in 2012. Government ministers are meeting at a U.N. conference in Bali, Indonesia, to try to launch talks on a successor to the Kyoto pact to be concluded by 2009, which would allow three years for ratification before the existing pact expires. "I hope they will move the effective date of the new treaty forward by two years so that we don't wait until...

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has signed the instrument of ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. Mr Rudd says it is the first official act of the new Government and demonstrates the commitment to tackling climate change. The ratification document will be sent to the United Nations and it comes into effect 90 days after that. Mr Rudd says Australia will be a full member of the Kyoto Protocol before March next year. The agreement means Australia's greenhouse gas emissions should not be higher than 8 per cent above 1990 levels. Ratifying the treaty was one of Labor's major campaign promises....

AUSTRALIA’S new prime minister Kevin Rudd will mark his arrival on the international stage by announcing the withdrawal of his country’s combat troops from Iraq and signing the Kyoto treaty on climate change. Rudd, a republican and former diplomat, swept to power as his Labor party stormed to a landslide victory in yesterday’s elections. Official figures showed Labor had won more than 53% of the vote, compared with just under 47% for the ruling Liberal coalition of John Howard, who had served four terms as prime minister but lost his seat. Computer projections forecast that Labor would secure 86 seats...

A COUPLE of days before Al Gore was awarded his Nobel Peace prize, Michael Burton, an English High Court judge and apparently a fine film critic, ruled that Al's Oscar-winner An Inconvenient Truth was prone to "alarmism and exaggeration" and identified nine major factual errors. For example, the former vice-president predicts a rise in sea levels of 6m "in the near future". "The Armageddon scenario he predicts," declared Burton, "is not in line with the scientific consensus." I'll say. The so-called scientific consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests rising sea levels across the next century of somewhere...

NewsBusters reported Sunday that the media's fascination with record low ice in the Arctic ignored history while relying on satellite data that's only been around since 1979. At the same time, the press have totally boycotted news from the Southern Hemisphere where ice and snow levels are currently at their highest since data have been collected. Pretty convenient wouldn't you agree? Meteorologist Joe D'Aleo wrote at IceCap Tuesday : " While the news focus has been on the lowest ice extent since satellite monitoring began in 1979 for the Arctic, the Southern Hemisphere (Antarctica) has quietly set a new record...

What you probably won't hear at the Live Earth concert: a call for higher taxes on gasoline and fuel. The current crop of US presidential candidates can only wish for the spotlight that will shine on Al Gore Saturday. He's the luminary for a globe-spanning, rock-star-studded, anti-global-warming concert called Live Earth. Most likely, though, his most radical idea won't get a mention. The former vice president (and almost president) wants to replace the current payroll tax with a consumer tax on fossil-fuel use. This "carbon tax" would, of course, raise the price of gasoline and home heating/cooling. And it would...

Nearly half of U.S. residents who took part in a UPI-Zogby International poll said the United States shouldn't ratify the Kyoto global warming treaty. The agreement -- formally known as the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change -- has been ratified by about 170 countries and governmental bodies but the United States is not among that group.

Former Vice-President Al Gore flew to Canada in order to denounce the Canadian government for its rejection of the Kyoto Treaty. Speaking at a Toronto screening of his movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore said that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s new climate policy is “a complete and total fraud and fundamentally ignorant.” “Nowhere in this plan does the Canadian government acknowledge my seminal work on this greatest of crises,” Gore complained. “Neither does the plan mention that my company, Generation Investment Management (GIM), offers opportunities for ecologically-minded investors. The government’s failure to incorporate these facts into its climate planning is designed...

H aven't we heard enough from Al Gore, the U.S. windbag turned Hollywood celebrity who presumes to lecture Canadians on their environmental responsibilities? The failed U.S. presidential candidate spends a lot of time in Canada, perhaps because he finds it fertile ground for self-enrichment. The multi-millionaire with a carbon footprint the size of a Sasquatch was in Toronto at the weekend, preening himself among adoring fans. He was introducing a showing of his Oscar-winning movie An Inconvenient Truth, that apocalyptic vision of a world in meltdown that has earned him the soubriquet of "the world's most famous environmentalist." Gore, whose...

The current debate about global warming is "completely irrational," and people need to start taking a different approach, say two Ottawa scientists. Carleton University science professor Tim Patterson said global warming will not bring about the downfall of life on the planet. Patterson said much of the up-to-date research indicates that "changes in the brightness of the sun" are almost certainly the primary cause of the warming trend since the end of the "Little Ice Age" in the late 19th century. Human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the gas of concern in most plans to curb climate change, appear to...