Humiliation For Bush - US Forced To Agree To Climate Talks

As Nasrudin once said, maybe we can teach the damn horse to fly.

From the Independent:

The fight against catastrophic global warming scored its greatest success to date yesterday, when negotiators from more than 180 nations unexpectedly agreed to develop far-reaching measures to combat climate change.

In the process, the delegates to the climate summit in Montreal dealt a humiliating blow to President George Bush's five-year attempt to destroy the Kyoto Protocol. The United States, which tried to sabotage the meeting at the last minute by walking out of the negotiations, was forced to join the agreement after failing to persuade a single nation to join it.

Yesterday's agreement - far from burying the Kyoto Protocol as the US wanted - has confirmed it and extended it. The 39 nations governed by it - all the industrialised countries apart from the US and Australia - have agreed in principle to make deeper cuts in the pollution emissions causing climate change when their present clean-up commitments run out in 2012.

They have decided to agree the new cuts by 2008, far faster than expected.

Meanwhile the US has, against its will, had to agree to talks with both rich and developing countries to new measures that all nations can take on combating the threat. The resolution is vague and the talks are only "open and non-binding", but it is far more than the US wanted or most people expected.

Bush and his sycophants have been left out in the cold as far as public opinion at home and abroad are concerned. Three-quarters of Americans now demand action on climate change and nearly 200 cities and many states have already taken their own far-reaching measures to cut pollution.

We also had the pleasure of seeing Bill Clinton take Bush to the woodshed, calling his administration's disruptive drama-queening, obstructivism and constant anti-science carping "dead wrong".