Global Warming and the G8

As tens of thousands of protesters prepare for the G8 Summit in Germany, Bush is preparing to face tension over the issue of the environment from the other seven industrialized nations. Patrick J. Michaels, Senior Fellow at the CATO Institute, sums up the differences:

President Bush recently announced plans for a new international agreement limiting future carbon dioxide emissions. But Europeans insist that any post-Kyoto climate pact be formulated and administered by the United Nations -- this is not an insignificant difference.

The UN's track record on climate change is abysmal. The Kyoto Protocol is its only legacy. If every nation of the world abided by its emissions targets, there would be no detectable reduction in warming, even fifty years from now. But even the EU isn't going to hit its Kyoto targets. Given this history, it's fair to ask why the UN should even be asked to produce another climate treaty.

The U.S. wants emissions caps from China and India, as well as from the G8. It is unclear that the UN can accomplish this, even though China is likely to become the world's largest emitter by 2009. Any agreement that does not include them will most certainly have little effect on climate change.

It is important to remember these facts: Even if the demands of global warming propagandists were implemented, we will not stop global warming. There is agreement on this fact from virtually all sides. It is especially true that the vaunted Kyoto Protocol will not stop global warming, since the developing countries that are rapidly becoming the largest emitters of greenhouse gases are not covered.

Environmentalists want such restrictions on "Greenhouse gases" imposed even though it will not stop global warming because they want to force human beings to live a "sustainable lifestyle" (whatever that means). For a toxicly-high percentage of environmentalists, "sustainable lifestyle" means something like the Indians "enjoyed" before Columbus.

Forcing human beings to live a "natural" lifestyle is more important to environmentalists than global warming. If the only people on earth were environmentalists living a "sustainable lifestyle," and global warming were discovered, environmentalists would do absolutely nothing about it, because the climate change would be "natural." The goal of the global warming movement is to impose the morality of their "Gaia" religion on human behavior, not stop global warming.