DO ALL THE PLAYERS IN BONN THINK THE KYOTO PROTOCOL WILL HAPPEN?
OH NO, BUT THEY HAVE VERY DIFFERENT REASONS AS TO WHY NOT. One vocal and respected member of the European Business Council feels that baselines will absolutely never be agreed upon by the parties. Without baselines, there is no way to say you have met your emissions reduction obligation. So. he pushes for hammering consumers with carbon taxes and funding more persuasive tactics through the general Tobin tax on all currency transactions. A savvy NGO representative stated firmly to me that “these bureaucrats will keep stringing together multiple meetings, but Kyoto will never happen” because there is no political benefit to being the man in one of the 38 countries on the hook, who tells people they can not have energy. And, it also won’t happen because there is no environmental benefit to it. The most powerful reason for there to be no passage of the Kyoto Protocol or any treaty like it rests on the absence of any rebuttal to seven statements put forward a few years back. One of the able
