Just what we need in this time of serious economic straits: an expensive boondoggle to solve a problem that may not exist, and might even be the exact opposite of the commonly held belief of the environmentally fashionable. NYT:

within weeks of taking office, President Obama has radically shifted the global equation, placing the United States at the forefront of the international climate effort and raising hopes that an effective international accord might be possible. Mr. Obama’s chief climate negotiator, Todd Stern, said last week that the United States would be involved in the negotiation of a new treaty — to be signed in Copenhagen in December — “in a robust way.”…

as the European Union and the countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol have tried such projects over the past few years, problems have emerged. Most notably, it is hard to determine the emissions-reducing value of carbon credit projects, making it easy to game the system. The new treaty, experts say, will also have to broaden Kyoto’s focus beyond industrial emissions to activities like airline travel, one of the fastest-growing sources of carbon emissions. In the end, it will also have to include financial mechanisms and technical assistance to help developing countries cope with climate change…

American negotiators were limited in Kyoto by a Senate resolution saying that the United States would not accept numerical caps unless China did as well. But Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said, “There has been a sea change in the Senate,” and he added that he believed that there were enough votes — Democratic and Republican — to ratify a strong treaty.

We wrote very little that was critical of the incoming administration as it assembled its team and raised the prospect that President Obama might try to govern from the center. In little more than a month, Obama’s counterproductive economic policy choices have clarified matters considerably. Decisions will likely come from the left, and pretty far left for that matter; talk about consensus building appears to be just for the cameras. We’ll just have to see what happens to this latest expensive boondoggle. (Oops — it seems that we may already know.)

UPDATE — Meanwhile, NASA’s James Hansen has apparently “gone off the deep end.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 1st, 2009 at 11:12 am and is filed under Democrats, General, Republicans, business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.