Australia and New Zealand should follow Canada and immediately withdraw from the failed Kyoto Protocol.
With Canada deciding to cut and run, no country in the Americas bears Kyoto liabilities. And with the announcement by Japan that it will not renew its membership, there will be no Kyoto bunnies in Asia. It is time for the two lonely suckers in the South Pacific to also withdraw.
Kyoto has achieved nothing useful. Some countries such as Russia achieved fraudulent cuts by retrospectively choosing their base year to take advantage of the plant closures that followed the Soviet collapse. Others evaded real cuts by paying for often phantom cuts in other countries. Australia used larceny to seize carbon credits by banning regrowth clearing on private farmland. New Zealand is sacrificing their forestry industry on the Kyoto altar.
Europe’s worship of Kyoto has led them into their current fiscal mess. Believing they are gods who can control the climate by demonising carbon, they have spent a fortune on green energy, carbon trading and international junkets that has exacerbated their deficits and now condemns their industry and consumers to expensive and unreliable energy.
The future for Australia and New Zealand lies around the vibrant Pacific, not in the European backwater. We should abandon Kyoto, cease wasting money on the IPCC, abolish all climate change bureaucracies and repeal all carbon tax and trade legislation.
The money saved should be used to develop appropriate infrastructure to cope with the inevitable natural disasters whenever they occur.
Viv Forbes,
Rosewood
