Blair’s global warming stance leaves Canada out in the cold
British Prime Minister Tony Blair is arguably the most attractive, visionary and courageous politician in the democratic world.
As I’ve said before, somewhat like Bill Clinton but with more vision and far, far more ethics.
Blair took an outdated Labour Party, controlled in the main by 1930s-style union leaders and radicals, and moulded it into the British version of America’s Democratic party.
Naturally, he paid no attention to Canada’s Liberal party and government, which may well be one of the most self-serving and corrupt political entities in the free world.
Aside from his political acumen in rebuilding the Labour Party, his courage was demonstrated when, against popular opinion in Britain, he threw his nation’s all-out support behind President George W. Bush in the war against terrorism, and the liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein.
That’s the war, incidentally, that as Peter Worthington noted in (“Case made for Iraq invasion,” Sept. 18) is being steadily won with positive ramifications across the entire Middle East.
The scornful Lib-Left will eventually be seen to have blundered badly by opposing Bush and Blair on this issue.
When you see the shambling Jean Chretien or the dithering Paul Martin, the contrast between an articulate politician who knows what has to be done and goes ahead and does it is striking.
Yet here’s a move by Blair that should really shake up the Lib-Left, and might even make Martin pause and think deeply for a change, in that the British leader has now declared the Kyoto Accord to be unfeasible.
It won’t work, Blair told a conference on “global challenges” in New York City.
Blair told the conference, coincidentally organized by Clinton, that he had to be “brutally honest” about Kyoto, of which he was once a big backer.
No country, he said, is going to cut its economic growth or consumption to implement the draconian Kyoto regulations.
His argument was two-pronged: No one in the western industrialized democracies is going to allow their standard of living to be ravaged by adhering to Kyoto, and no developing nations such as India and China are going to halt their industrial and economic growth by accepting Kyoto.
Observers de-scribed Blair’s stance as a major “U-turn” in his thinking on Kyoto and assessed the pact’s former strong supporter had “effectively torn up the document” after deciding quarrels over its implementation will “never be resolved.”
Blair’s assessments weren’t given much prominence in the mainstream media, they being contained basically in official conference documents that took some time to be made public—and were therefore supposedly not “hot news,” although the prestigious London Daily Telegraph gave them top play.
That Kyoto was badly flawed, and had little to do with global warming or the environment, was known by any objective person with an ounce of intelligence from day one.
Kyoto’s true raison d’etre was a huge shift of jobs and wealth from developed nations, which would have to drastically tune down their economies, to developing nations, such as India and China, not currently forced to adhere to Kyoto’s restrictions.
It was a con job all along. Nothing less, nothing more.
No one—not even the world’s top scientists—really know if emissions such carbon dioxide cause global warming.
What they do know—but the Lib-Left pretends otherwise—is carbon dioxide is harmless to health.
Kyoto committed member countries to cut greenhouse gases by an average of 5% from 1990 levels by 2012. Canada itself had promised a 6% cut from 1990 levels, yet since emissions have risen in our country by 24% since 1990, it’s obviously impossible to meet the Chretien/Martin targets without closing down the entire nation.
Bush recognized that, which is why the U.S. refused to sign the treaty.
Actually, the U.S. Senate, was split on the issue, which shows in Washington, unlike Canada, Kyoto became a non-partisan issue—really a common sense issue.
Australian Prime Minister John Howard kept his country out of the pact. Vladimir Putin’s Russia still can’t decide whether it is for or against Kyoto.
The bottom line is now with Blair joining Bush and Howard in acknowledging Kyoto won’t work, why Martin is again standing on the outside looking in.
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