VIENTIANE TRUMPS KYOTO

Some fairly big recent news that the media is pretty much ignoring right now is the U.S. announcement in Vientiane, Laos last week that it was joining five other nations (China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Australia) in signing a pact with some refreshingly new approaches to the issue of "climate change".

Now, I'm not a believer in "man made" climate change. The science is bogus and makes extreme assumptions. CO2 levels contributed by all human activities account for only one-tenth of a percent of the CO2 in the atmosphere. Additionally, the "global warming" scientists can't seem to get their act together. In the 1970's - they were complaining that human activities (pollution) were going to cause our rapid decent into an ICE AGE. The arguement there being that all that pollution back then was causing accellerated cooling of the Earth. This was all based on a couple of especially frigid winters. Then, when the winters got warmer in the 80's - and their theory fell apart - they adopted a new "Global Warming" theory - based on the same flawed science that produced the "Ice Age" theory in the 70's. The clear error these discredited scientists are making - is that they are "chasing" current trends in the climate without considering the entire history of the Earth's climate. You can't verify hypothoses based on 50, or even 100 years of data - and that is all the data we really have. You CAN go back and analyze things like tree trunks or ice core samples to get an idea of what the temperatures were like 1,000 years ago - but that is not an exact science. So I just don't buy the man induced "Global Warming" theories put forth by these scientists who have been wrong in the past.

I DO believe in "Global Warming" though. I believe that the Earth has been in a continuous cycle of "ice ages" followed by periods of "global warming" since it's birth. And the science backs this up.

And I also believe that we, as humans, need to be good stewards of mother Earth. I believe in sensible steps to reduce pollution - not to prevent Global Warming (because that's going to happen with or without us humans) - but to give our children and future generations a higher quality of life here on the planet.

And that is why I kind of like this new Vientiane agreement.

First ... the six countries who are signatories to this agreement represent 45% of the earth's population. So this is no "light weight" agreement - this agreement clearly rivals Kyoto.

Second ... it's a SENSIBLE agreement. The first statement in the agreement is ... "Development and poverty eradication are urgent and overriding goals internationally."

This agreement is a PRO-GROWTH approach to reducing emissions - Kyoto is ANTI-GROWTH. The driving force behind Kyoto is greenhouse gas reduction quotas - numbers that countries MUST meet. And the only way they can possibly meet them is to reduce, significantly, their energy consumption. Reducing energy consumption at this point in time means reduced growth.

The Vientiane agreement seeks to ... "address energy, climate change and air pollution issues within a paradigm of economic development."

Exactly the way it should be!

The THIRD reason I like this agreement ... is because Jaques Chirac DOESN'T. France has been a religious zealot when it comes to Kyoto - and they've been highly critical of the U.S. for not signing on to that agreement. However, even with as much GAS as France has put into Kyoto - they are going to FAIL to meet the targets they set for themselves in that agreement by 2012!

And they aren't the only ones - over 80% of the signatories to Kyoto have no possible hope of meeting their 2012 goals. No hope.

Kyoto is a dead agreement - it just hasn't been pronounced DEAD yet.

The Vientiane agreement will become the model for future agreements encompassing much more of the population of the Earth. And those agreements will BURY Kyoto. I'm pround, and every American should be proud - that the U.S. is leading the effort in this.