The death of Kyoto....

Here's an important op-ed in today's Financial Post by Hans Labohm, who is co-author of "Man-Made Global Warming: Unraveling a Dogma."

This week, Blair seemed to move even further away from the target-based Kyoto approach. On Monday, at a summit of energy ministers in London, he said the hard Kyoto-type targets made some people "very nervous and very worried." He said the world faced a "very important moment" over climate change and needed to work towards "a better, more sensitive set of mechanisms to deal with this problem."

Initially, Blair's spectacular U-turn on Kyoto in New York met with deafening silence in his own backyard. Apparently, it was so unbelievable that it took the British press 10 days before it could break out of its spell of denial and start to report about it.

As Phillip Stott, one of Britain's best-known climate skeptics, and webmaster of the very perceptive (and humorous) blog EnviroSpin Watch, commented: "Much of the British media has invested enormous amounts of uncritical, emotional, soggy 'left' capital in support of the Kyoto Protocol over the last 10 or so years. They have too willingly failed to apply critical journalism to the politics of climate change, with far too many commentators and news broadcasters allowing their own prejudices show." Even the BBC, which traditionally is regarded as the paragon of high journalistic standards, has been acting as a pro-Kyoto propaganda instrument, with its relentlessly one-sided coverage of the Kyoto debate, scaring its viewers with endless barrages of environmental doom and gloom.

Of course, Blair's admission has outraged environmentalists on both sides of the Atlantic, who lamented that it flied in the face of his promises made in the past two years. Moreover, they feared that it will effectively block the upcoming Ottawa talks on a new treaty to combat climate change. Tony Juniper, executive director of Friends of the Earth, called the Prime Minister's volte-face "unbelievable" and "extremely retrograde and dangerous," adding: "Having failed to practise what he preaches, he is now changing his preaching to match his practice."

But, please read the whole thing...