Japan in 1997:
Japan today:
Cancún climate change summit: Japan refuses to extend Kyoto protocol
Talks threatened with breakdown after forthright Japanese refusal to extend Kyoto emissions commitments
* John Vidal guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 1 December 2010 18.16 GMT
Japan refuses to extend Kyoto protocol. ‘The forthrightness of the statement took people by surprise,’ said one British official
The delicately balanced global climate talks in Cancún suffered a serious setback last night when Japan categorically stated its opposition to extending the Kyoto protocol – the binding international treaty that commits most of the world’s richest countries to making emission cuts.
The Kyoto protocol was adopted in Japan in 1997 by major emitting countries, who committed themselves to cut emissions by an average 5% on 1990 figures by 2012.
However the US congress refused to ratify it and remains outside the protocol.
The brief statement, made by Jun Arima, an official in the government’s economics trade and industry department, in an open session, was the strongest yet made against the protocol by one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases.
He said: “Japan will not inscribe its target under the Kyoto protocol on any conditions or under any circumstances.”
The move came out of the blue for other delegations at the conference.
more at the Guardian
=========================================================
Reality bites, when Japan says something so blunt, you know they mean it – Anthony
h/t to WUWT reader Steve (Paris)
UPDATE: I’ve made this a “sticky” to stay at the top of WUWT awhile – Anthony
All those who doubt what the Japanese have said should follow this article’s link to the Guardian and look at the video there. The Japan Friends of the Earth guy didn’t look too happy.
Prattling while the plebs freeze
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/12/prattling-while-plebs-freeze.html
@Keith. at hastings uk
You forgot to mention we also have politicians deeply involved in tax avoidance (all colours) who expect us to pay more tax to avoid being boiled-alive as the North Sea slowly turns to steam.
It would be better to state that we have so many politicians mired in corruptive diversion of public funds to their friends in various industries (usually located in tax havens around the world).
Doubtless they will end their political lives and be “incorporated” within various companies (if they are not already, and many already are !)
old engineer says:
December 2, 2010 at 8:08 pm
So far only Paul Birch and Mr. Lynn have seeming got it right. Japan won’t vote for extending Kyoto, because it is unfair to current signers. But would vote for a new treaty that includes everybody.
[…]
But, since a new treaty is not going to happen, they also get released from the things they signed up for in Kyoto. Very clever, the Japanese.
Precisely. And the new treaty wont happen because “everybody”, such as Brazil, China, India, South Africa, etc., wont have it, therefore Japan gets free. Nice move.
I think comments previously made about Japan already being an energy-efficient economy is spot on so it’d be hard to achieve greater efficiencies from here on out. Same for comments that Japan may now realize that AGW is a scam and their own analyses indicate that any CO2 reduction in general, and by Japan in particular, won’t matter to climate at all.
But there are a couple other factors that probably will push Japan to sink the Cancun confab. First, I don’t think anyone had a good grasp in 1997 of how fast China would expand its CO2 production, which is now greater than America’s and will likely double in the not so distant future. Second, Japan is now in demographic decline. Their population is aging fast while the worker proportion of the population is shrinking. They can’t afford to economically burden their population further. Third, I think the Japanes realize that they’ve been had by Russia and Germany. Those two countries racked up a lot of climate “credits” because they closed down a lot of inefficient communist factories after the Cold War ended. Fourth, and maybe most importantly, the Chinese are getting more assertive militarily and economically and are scaring the bejeebers out of the Japanese. This at a time when the Japanese are now wondering if America has the fortitude and where-with-all to provide security and protection to the Japanese homeland. I’d guess the Japanese aren’t getting any warm fuzzy feelings on this point based on Obama’s foreign policy approach to our allies. And last, the Japanese may have hoped the developed nations would be setting an inspirational example in the climate fight and thus inspire the developing world and America to join in. That obviously didn’t work out at all.
@ur momisuglyMichael @ur momisugly FIFA
The bbc had a program on the TV a few weeks ago:
“FIFA’s Dirty Secrets”
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00wfl8t/Panorama_Fifas_Dirty_Secrets/)
Not available in other countries (well, not officially)
and the tax-research website had a comment on it:
“But there’s not a shadow of doubt that the demands for tax exemption made by FIFA for what is, let’s be candid, a private sporting event undertaken for profit, were ludicrous and open to considerable abuse which left South Africa considerable out of pocket and might well have done the same to the UK”
http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/
Sorry to break this to you guys but Japan has a very powerful ally, very powerful indeed. Seems that God is a skeptic a denier.
Quote
Cancún climate change summit: Is God determined to prevent a deal? Is the divine presence a Republican? Or is He/She/It running an inter-galactic fossil fuel conglomerate?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/dec/02/cancun-climate-change-summit-monbiot
Unquote
Penned by one of the alarmists greatest shining lights no less.
Its over
Clearly the Japanese economy similar to many other economies in recession cannot afford to impose costly emission controls on its industry. Particularly when it sees China next door opening a new coal fired power station every 5 days. It is about time that George Monbiot and his left wing Gradnian readers realised that the world does not want to be blugdeoned back into the Stone Age by the stupid IPCC or anyone else with senseless calls for ridiculous emissions cuts and daft geo-engineering schemes. The Earth will not warm up to dangerous levels in the next 100 years (no time at all in the geological time frame) and will continue with its cycle of ice ages and inter glacials.
International Conferences are very much like International Poker Games, regardless of their title or the many reasons they are called into being, they are all about $$$$MONEY$$$!!!! Usually the BIG BOYS go home with most of the Mu-La, but they also have characteristics of a feast of a BIG Elephant killed by a pride of lions (because it was too old, sick, or injured), there’s usually enough left over for a lot of vultures, jackels, wilddogs, rats, ants, and a thousand and one other lifeforms. Everyone gets fed!
Japan isn’t doing anything that is out of the ordinary. Cancun isn’t going to be as big as Copenhagen (could have been). Life and diplomacy will go on and on. But…. remember it’s all about $$$$MONEY$$$!!!! It has absolutely NOTHING to do with saving the World for anyone’s Great Great Grandchildren. Or reducing CO2. Or cleaning up the oceans. Or making life better for anyone in some poor starving country somewhere. There’s a BIG dead Elephant and it’s feeding time in Cancun, Mexico; and the vultures, and jackels, and rats know it.
“Japan’s rejection of extending Kyoto is hardly a win for the critics of AGW. Clearly Japan wants a stronger treaty. The real win is that the US Congress refused to ratify Kyoto even before the Republican victories a few months ago. There is zero chance Congress will ratify a stronger treaty.”
I disagree. Japan is saying that they will not be bound by rules that other people don’t have to abide by. China, India, and the US aren’t going to accept these rules, so for all practical purposes Japan joins them.
Sure, if by some miracle every nation int he world has trancendental moment and joins together in peace and harmony, signs a new accord, and sticks with it, then Japan would happily impliment it. But that isn’t going to happen.
George Monbiot of the Guardina is one of journalism’s truly great crackpots. Invoking a Divine presence at Cancun scuppering the believers’ legally binding agreement(s).
Pulling the plug on Al Gore.
It took the world some time but it finally saw how it was going to look like when it was to be saved by Al Gore and we didn’t like what we saw.
We will need a few years to role back the “fruits” of the Green Madness but in the end
the history books will state that it was the USA that never signed the Kyoto Protocol that saved the world from the biggest totalitarian coup attempt in the history of human kind.
Japan will be remembered as the Nation that simply corrected a mistake.
There won’t be a scare big enough to bring us back on green roads.
Those who still try will be rediculed, laughed at and buried with sound scientific evidence to proof their wrong.
It’s over.
At last. We are all going to live happily ever after.
j ferguson says:
December 2, 2010 at 11:20 am
There are similar controversial topics. There are other sources of decaying smells out there..:-)
In the end…which were the only ones to fulfill Kyoto?…California and the UK ?
What do they share in common?
@rational debate
Sigh. Ya. AGW gravy trainers, can’t live with ‘em, can’t eat ‘em.
Who say you can’t eat them? They are plump and well-fed, having been raised on only the finest foods, totally organic, too. Delicious in a little white wine, shallots and cremini mushrooms or roasted on a spit!
Good news everyone, increased CO2 emissions are actually GOOD for the planet.
http://www.co2science.org/
You must love this hilarious post:
Vicki Pope can’t get to Cancun, too much snow!
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010 … much-snow/
My copy of the Spectator has just been delivered by our postman. I’m amazed he made it as it is extremely icy outside despite having “warmed up” to -3.5C and also as I nearly crumpled his van yesterday when I gently applied my brakes on a slight incline, zero braking resulted, accelerated slide towards him.
Back to the Speccie – the editorial fills me with joy: (I can’t get a link so will reproduce it)
“Less heat, more light
We have heard surprisingly little about the climate change jamboree currently underway in Cancun. Before last year’s Copenhagen summit, there was much hulabaloo. Gordon Brown told us that we had “fewer than 50 days to set the course of the next 50 years”. Yet he and 100 of his political counterparts could not stop the conference from collapsing under the weight of its contradictions. This year, only two dozen world leaders are likely to make the carbon-consuming trek to the Mexican coast. David Cameron, to his credit, [hmm not sure about that, but it is a Tory mag] will not be one of them.
He will not miss much. One paper preapred for the Cancun summit, by Prof. Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, proposes halting economic growth in the developed world for the next 20 years. It continues, “The second world war and the concept of rationing is something we need to seriously consider.” Such ideas place the Cancun summit only a few intellectual notches above a Star Trek convention. [!!Sorry any Trekkies out there]
Yet again, the conference seems to be a stage on which scientific inquiry is displaced by propoganda. And the tragedy is that there is much to be discussed. The global warming orthodoxy – to which every main British political party subscribes – rests on four pillars of received wisdom. Climate change is happening; it is driven by human activity; global catastrophe is imminent; and radical, government-directed carbon reduction is the only answer. For climate zealots, one either believes all four propositions or one is a ‘denier’.
If reasonable debate were allowed, several important issues would present themselves. What, for instance, is the cost to our manufacturing sector of the carbon emissions targets? Green taxes will slow Britain’s recovery. But by how much, and what, precisely, would we achieve in agreeing to foresake greater prosperity? How might technological developments help us cope with global warming? And are there cheaper, more efficient ways of preparing for climate change?
Some estimate that painting roofs a reflective white on Los Angeles properties would slow the rate of global warming in the city by 90 years. Michael Bloomberg is looking at a similar scheme in New York. Minght that be an alternative to wealth-destroying carbon taxes? The hysteria does not allow such questions to be asked.
Historians will probably look back at this as the time when global warming alarmism reached its peak, when rational debate was at its most restricted and politicians at their most gullible. The most egregious instance of hysteria came in the autumn when the tax-payer subsidised 10:10 group produced a star-studded video showing the gory detonation of school-children who disagreed with their teacher when she recited the green concensus.
Lat year’s political hyperbole over climate change has been replaced by an embarrassed silence – and this is almost as worrying. Serious economic and ecological issues are not being addressed. the government still accepts the agenda set by its predecessors, an agenda that threatens to destroy jobs with no benefit to the planet. the British public has never been persuaded by the fantastical claims of environmental doomsayers, so a sensible debate about climate change should be possible. All it needs is some clearsightedness on the part of our leaders.”
I hope and pray that this might just be the thing to kick-start the debate in the UK. You can’t expect politicians to do an abrupt volte face as the other parties will just join in giving them a good kicking. But, if you start to open up the debate, especially looking at it all in economic terms, then perhaps a few more MPs might just begin to have a bit of courage and start to express their inner views (I am convinced many of them think climate warming/change/disruption is a load of old rubbish and what better time to start than now, when we have all this snow on the ground).
“Anybody know how 2010 can be the hottest year on record when it has not ended?”
The climate gods of the AGWR (r as in religion) have decided so.
As an aside, can somebody please explain how a two degree rise in temperature is “catastrophic”. The Antarctic is minus 55 degrees, two degrees makes that minus 53, how will that melt it. Do all the pensioners who move from Detroit or Manchester to Forida/Spain die because of the increased heat?
No wonder the Japanese said enough is enough.
Wow, if we hear of another walk-out (did Japan walk out after this announcement?), or another refusal tomorrow this would pretty much constitute a “streak” wouldn’t it?
Yesterday Pelosi’s climate cabal is dismantled, today Japan just says NO to Kyoto extension, tomorrow…?
The coffee just keeps tastin’ better & better…what a day!
In a daring countermove, Greedy P’s and others have staged a
Hug Kyoto event
It just warms the cockles of one’s heart. Next, they’ll be sitting around a campfire, singing kumbaya and eating s’mores.
Japan and the long view.
It is probably due to an honor issue that Japan has made a firm statement about not supporting a continuance of the Kyoto Protocol. I think they see the fiasco that the EU (carbon cartel) has made of it and also the games played by China (China is not a democratic nation, it remains a rigid dictatorship) . Plus, and most importantly, they see their strongest ally, the USA, turning away from structures like the Kyoto Protocol and the IPCC.
Their message, to me, is more like . . . the current Kyoto Protocol induced situation is so dishonorable that it shall not survive, if Japan has anything to say about it.
I think their forward, long view, message is . . . . back to the drawing board and start this thing again but with more objective basis this time around. I take it that the Japan gov’t, by its Cancun stance, does not consider the climate to be an urgent, catastrophic situation that it is made to be by western advocates of hysteria.
John
I know California didn’t follow Kyoto, as hard as they tried.
My understanding is that the only countries that managed to get close to the Kyoto targets either had a head start already, or severely damaged their economies.