10/18/2005

Holy Kyoto!

October 13, 2005
 
Did Chi Trib or Sun-T cover this, as noted by Roger Aronoff in today's Accuracy in Media newsletter?
The Kyoto Treaty has received a major, perhaps fatal, setback, though it was barely reported in the media. It occurred when British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the gathering at the Clinton Global Initiative in September, the same week that the United Nations had its annual gathering of world leaders, that the treaty was basically dead. Blair has been a major supporter of the treaty, and has unsuccessfully implored President Bush to sign on.
No, but each had items blaming Katrina on warming of our globe, Chi Trib here, with excellent diatribe by certified ranter Jeremy Rifkin, including this:
[A]s more and more people begin to ask, "What's happening to our weather?" it seems that all of official Washington is holding its breath, lest the dirty little secret gets out: that Katrina and Rita are the entropy bill for increasing carbon dioxide emissions and global warming.
And Sun-Times had this in a letter from Richard Younker, elsewhere identified as “an award-winning freelance photojournalist”:
Responsible scientists in the 1,500-member Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change cross their fingers in hopes that we cut back our use of fossil fuels before carbon dioxide levels double from their 1937 level, which could produce cataclysms that we don't want to ponder, that would make Hurricane Katrina seem like a petulant schoolgirl.
But nothing in either paper about what Blair said, which Aronoff calls “quite interesting”:
As reported by columnist James Pinkerton of TechCentralStation, Blair announced that he was going to speak with "brutal honesty" about Kyoto, and then proceeded to do so. "My thinking has changed in the past three or four years," he said. "No country is going to cut its growth." He added that countries such as the two largest in the world, China and India, who are both excluded from the terms of the treaty, "are not going to start negotiating another treaty like Kyoto."
Blair suggested that instead, "What countries will do is work together to develop the science and technology...There is no way that we are going to tackle this problem unless we develop the science and technology to do it."
 
Thus, Pinkerton concluded, "That's what eco-realists have been saying all along, of course—that the only feasible way to deal with the issue of greenhouse gases and global warming is through technological breakthroughs, not draconian cutbacks."
 
Wouldn’t Chi Trib and S-T have advanced discussion of this issue better with such reporting than with blanket condemnations of Bush et al.?  Not looking for knee jerk in either direction, just something intelligent.
 
# posted by Blithe Spirit : 10/13/2005 
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