Representatives of the G8 are meeting in Italy and are trying to negotiate a deal on “climate change.” The London Times reports that negotiations have hit a major snag:
Hopes of a deal on climate change at the Group of Eight industrialised nations summit in Italy were today hanging by a thread.
As world leaders sat down for a working lunch at the start of a three day meeting of the G8, it emerged that negotiations had failed to reach agreement on halving greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
Summit negotiators, who do the hard bargaining before the heads of state arrive to complete the agreements, failed to make progress on the issue in talks that continued late last night. China and India are understood to have blocked any mention of the target in the draft communiqué, insisting that the developed economies should promise to cut their own emissions sharply by 2020 before asking developing nations to commit to a long term target.
The breakdown in negotiations has undermined President Obama’s chances of producing a diplomatic coup when he chairs talks on climate change at a meeting of the 17-nation Major Economies Forum tomorrow.
The implications for Waxman-Markey, a version of which will soon be taken up by the Senate, are huge. If India and China–the world’s biggest emitter of CO2–decline to limit their carbon emissions, it is impossible to claim that Waxman-Markey will have any discernible impact on the Earth’s climate, even if you buy the anthropogenic global warming hoax hook, line and sinker. The only impact the bill could have would be to hobble America’s economy and pave the way for China and India to replace the U.S. as the economic superpowers of the 21st century.
The great advantage India and China have over the U.S. is that their elites have not gone suicidal. Those nations have no intention of sacrificing their economic well-being on the global warming altar. Undoubtedly the leading scientists in both countries have advised their governments that AGW is pseudo-science fueled by power-hungry politicians and charlatans like Al Gore, who has gotten rich by pretending to believe that burning gasoline will destroy the Earth, while relaxing aboard a gasoline-burning houseboat a third the size of a football field.
At this point, anyone who votes for tax-and-trade can no longer pretend that the bill has anything to do with climate. Rather, it is a vote that no manufacturing jobs should be created in the U.S., and that in the future, all such employment will belong to Chinese and Indian workers.
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