So, America, Australia, China and India are to do their own climate change thing! Under a secret agreement between the four of them they are bucking the Kyoto Protocol and striking out on their own with a technology-based initiative.
There’s never been a more unlikely quartet of bedfellows. Not so many years ago the US and China were daggers drawn over the latter’s threat to engulf Taiwan. India’s dislike of Chine rumbles on and all that Australia has to do is cork the bums of its billion-or-so farting sheep.
Alexander Downer, Australia’s Foreign Minister, is on record as saying: “It’s our view that you really need to focus on technological change to solve climate change. And you have to involve the major developing countries which are very substantial CO2 emitters. So having India and China involved in this process is very good at this stage and it’s just the beginning!”
Well, Downer might think that. But to have any effect at all on global warming surely we all have to sing from the song sheet. And certainly not America’s!
George Monbiot, the environmental campaigner and writer summed it up. He said: “I’ve never heard such a patination of bunkum as I’ve heard issuing from the mouth of Alexander Downer.
“It’s a deliberate attempt to subvert and undermine the Kyoto Protocol. Last year work began on hammering out a new Treaty that would bring in China and India. But the US, supported by Australia, systematically sabotaged and destroyed any attempt to deliver such a Treaty.
“So to then turn round and say we can’t sign on to this because India and China aren’t playing, suggests a brass neck five inches thick!”
Monbiot is 100% right. If reducing CO2 emissions is not going to happen under the Kyoto treaty, it’s certainly doesn’t stand a chance under the AACI treaty. He’s so damned right when he says that we have got to see emissions cut by between 80% - 90% by 2030.
What we really need is a whole new step change in government commitment at an international level. Otherwise, we will fry!
