The World’s Slowest Learners

Donna Laframboise (Canada)
".. In July 1997, five months prior to the fanfare in Kyoto, the US Senate had already passed the Byrd-Hagel resolution. The vote was 95-0. Let me repeat: the vote was unanimous. It was bi-partisan. This resolution made it clear that not a single Democrat or Republican senator was prepared to support an emissions agreement that would harm the US economy while ignoring the growing emissions of up-and-coming economies such as China and India (see here, here, and here).

Had US senators all danced naked on the dome of the Capitol Building while blaring the news through trumpets they could not have sent a clearer message that the Kyoto approach was a no-go.

That was 14 years ago.

So how have UN bureaucrats spent the past decade-and-a-half? According to these same people, climate change is a planetary emergency and time is running out. So did they abandon the idea of a global emissions treaty and pursue a Plan B? Did they move heaven and earth to find an approach that would be acceptable to US senators and would therefore enlist the participation of the world’s largest economy?

Uh, no. Instead, UN bureaucrats (and their close friends in the environmental movement) have spent the past 14 years pretending – against all evidence – that a Kyoto-style treaty was somehow achievable. Thousands of them have flown off to exotic locales at regular intervals to hold climate summit after climate summit. Again and again they’ve pretended for the TV cameras that reaching such an agreement was a realistic expectation.

What, exactly, have these people been smoking?

Or, to use a phrase from my undergraduate days in women’s studies – Which part of ‘no’ did they not understand?"