EU Kyoto Treaty Chickens Come Home to Roost (Kat-Mo)

The one thing that Bill Clinton got right was not signing the Kyoto Treaty. [edit, big time...Bill Clinton had Al Gore "symbolically" sign the treaty on behalf of the United States. Congress, a republican congress?, refused to ratify...thank you Kevin; so Bill Clinton is still a giant rat]. George Bush took so much flack for not doing it either you would have thought he was personally responsible for the impending doom of the world to be subsumed into a fiery desert.

I distinctly recall watching a sort of "town hall" meeting with Jacque "full of crap" Chirac in which a young French woman asked what the individual citizen could do, beyond basic recycling, to help reduce global warming. Jacque "full of crap" Chirac responded in typical politician style by going all over the place and then pronouncing that it was the EU's job to convince the United States to join this piece of crap treaty that everybody was diligently pointing out would drive business away.

Well, now the chickens have come home to roost. European business leaders are threatening to take their businesses somewhere else where the environmental restrictions are not so damaging. They claim that the new carbon emissions offset programs amount to a "tax" (which they are, the EU just didn't want to call it that) and that the restrictions will cost "44 billion" a year in the next seven years.

China and India have no such restrictions and are exempt under the Kyoto treaty. Germany and Italy (both with some of the highest unemployment in Europe) are starting to wonder if these EU environmental demands shouldn't be scrapped while the head of the EU is confident that Sarkozy, with his environmental revolution campaign promise, will help ram it through the EU council.

Italy's minister of innovation says it best, "If it happens, it would kill the economic upturn. No one needs to kill themselves." You think?

But that is exactly how the west is going to die. Not by invasion, though possibly through population decimation from lack of healthy replacement. We will believe ourselves so advanced beyond the troglodyte ancestors of the industrial revolution that we will regulate ourselves in to irrelevance.

Hear that, John McCain?

posted by xgenghisx at 04:29 PM

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