A Tempest in the Full Milk Lattes

Oh, Canada

Canada has let it leak that it is going to withdraw from the Kyoto protocol, the UN's "treaty" to combat global warming.  A spurious treaty to deal with a faux issue.  Kyoto and the global warming mob at the UN are a picture postcard for all that is wrong with the UN, which we believe to be irremediable and terminal. 

The Canadian government is not withdrawing because it believes that anthropogenic global warming is a crock.  Rather, it is going to "go it alone", believing it can do more and better under its own efforts.  This is a highly significant move for New Zealand, because the most potent rationale for our right leaning government to impose an Emissions Trading Scheme (aka, the grand tax on all human activity) has been its positive impact upon trade.
  Yes, yes, the callow pundits of National mutter.  We know that New Zealand's emissions of the deadly carbon gas amount to diddley squat.  We know that nothing we do as a nation will effect carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere--the greenest of all gases, incidentally--but it is the principle of the thing.  If New Zealand proves itself a good international citizen, other nations will continue to trade with us.  The ETS is just a price of doing business in the modern world. 

Well, Canada just blew that grand canard away.  Better find a new argument, boys.  Your list of arguments is getting shorter by the day. 

Canada is going to the latest UN climate charade with a commitment not to sign any extension to Kyoto.

(Environment Minister) Kent said in the House of Commons on Nov. 22 he won't sign a document at the Durban conference that extends the Kyoto targets. "Canada goes to Durban with a number of countries sharing the same objective, and that is to put Kyoto behind us," Kent said.

So it's not just Canada.  There are a number of countries turning away from Kyoto.  This will cause a tempest in the full-milk lattes on Lambton Quay this morning.  Weren't we told with great solemnity and haute morality that a treaty is a treaty, and New Zealand--having signed the ignominious Kyoto Protocol--was ethically and morally bound to keep its attendant commitments and obligations.  Why, we would be a pariah in the international community if we were not to keep our treaty obligations, blah, blah, blah.  Well colour me pink and strike me down with a feather.  Canada's morality is apparently not as haute as obtuse little ol' New Zealand.  Nor, it seems, are other nations so high and mighty.  Another argument used by Nick Smith and John Key bites the dust.  The list of spurious pretexts gets shorter by the hour.

Eventually reality will intrude through the morass of high morals in Wellington.  Some time in the next five years, the Government will announce the ETS will be delayed until 2187.  Then, in the fine print one day, it will let slip that it is dismantling the whole ignominious charade.  Can't come soon enough.