Kyoto Died Yesterday. Did Anyone Notice?

From Reuters G8 leaders agree "substantial" greenhouse gas cuts:

World leaders agreed on Thursday to pursue substantial but unspecified cuts in greenhouse gases and work with the United Nations to clinch a new deal to fight global warming by 2009.

The agreement, sealed at a G8 summit on the Baltic coast, binds the world's largest polluter, the United States, more closely into international efforts to curb the gases scientists say are causing dangerous changes to world weather patterns.

But it does not commit the club of industrialized nations -- Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States -- to the firm emissions reduction targets that the summit host, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, had wanted.

President George W. Bush has refused to sign up to numerical targets before rising powers like China and India make similar pledges. Convincing them to join the U.N. process will be crucial to reversing a rise in global temperatures.

And here is CBS/AP on it:

"The agreement is a major advance for greenhouse gas emissions reduction because it bridged the very large gap between the Bush Administration's proposal of no targets and the European Union interest in setting specific guidelines," said CBS News foreign affairs analyst Pamela Falk from the U.N., "and while there is skepticism because the agreement does not go as far as the Kyoto Protocol would have, it represents a reversal in the U.S. position toward finding common ground on global warming."

British Prime Minister Tony Blair was asked if there was "wiggle room." He said the final result would depend on upcoming U.N. climate change negotiations.

"However, there is now a process to lead to that agreement, and at its heart is a commitment to a substantial cut," he said. "What does substantial mean? That serious consideration is given to the halving of emissions by 2050."

Blair called the deal "a major, major step forward."

But Annie Petsonk, a lawyer for the advocacy group Environmental Defense, said the summit hadn't agreed on a 50 percent cut — only on a call for all major emitters to seriously consider that option.

It is hysterical that the press is spinning this as if it signals a change in the position of the Bush administration. From the start the Bush administration has been pushing voluntary plans that would focus on technological improvements to lower emissions as opposed to mandatory time tables favored by Kyoto adherents. Bush got exactly what we wanted from the G8, and the Kyoto approach is dead.

Don't believe me? Ask yourself this: Does the "agreement" yesterday sound like Kyoto, or does it sound like the Bush led Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (AP6)? What the G8 agreement offers is political cover for the former Kyoto devotees as they back away from the hard caps, which is something that Canada has already been hinting at. (See here, here and here.) (And as such it represents a stinging defeat to Angela Merkel who seemed to still have some of that old time Kyoto religion.)

Here is Ed Morrissey's take over at Heading Right:

The American position has always been that any emissions agreement that excludes China and India, as well as other developing nations, would both be ineffective and unfair to the West. The Senate in 1997 took the same position when confronted with the Kyoto Accord, which they refused to even consider. Bush has followed in the same policy that the Senate unanimously demanded in 1997.

The American press continually misrepresents this, but the rejection was completely bipartisan at that time, and Europe had refused until now to consider changing the underlying structure of Kyoto. Now, however, the new G-8 agreement apparently includes the two biggest nations on Earth, with a third of the population in their borders. Not only that, but the agreement forgoes hard targets on emissions and the previous mandate for limiting the rise in global temperatures to two degrees Centigrade by 2050, a move which brought the condemnation of Greenpeace.

This agreement sounds very similar to the proposal that Bush has pushed for the last several years. The Asian-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (AP6) includes India and China in a series of efforts designed to yoke together the main economic systems of the Pacific to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. It would focus on sharing technology that would make energy production and manufacturing more efficient and therefore less impactful on the environment, rather than imposing arbitrary limits on nations. It would encourage progress through economic incentives rather than diplomatic penalties — and it would keep China and India from gaining a significant economic advantage in the global market.

I agree that dramatic change has occurred in the G-8 summit this week. The G-8 finally decided not to commit economic suicide and adopted Bush’s approach instead.

Kimberley A. Strassel over at the Opinion Journal has also noticed that this basically pulls the plug on Kyoto's life support: Bush 1, Greens 0

Just call him George W. Bush, star international diplomat. Don't snicker, don't spit out your coffee. Instead, read over the final document on climate change released yesterday by the Group of Eight.

Yes, it's a major shift in how the world will address the supposed threat of global warming. It's also largely the vision put forth years ago by none other than George W. Bush--that international cowboy--even if few European politicians will admit it.

Don't expect anyone to admit it. When Mr. Bush unveiled his new climate framework last week, calling on the world's powers to reduce greenhouse emissions, it was portrayed as a capitulation. He'd removed the last "obstacle" to world unity on this issue, and seen the error of his ways. At this week's Democratic presidential debate, every candidate vowed to fix the damage Mr. Bush had done to America's international reputation, his Kyoto failure the obvious example.

There's been a capitulation on global warming, but it hasn't happened in the Oval Office. The Kyoto cheerleaders at the United Nations and the European Union are realizing their government-run experiment in climate control is a mess, one that's incidentally failed to reduce carbon emissions. They've also understood that if they want the biggest players on board--the U.S., China, India--they need an approach that balances economic growth with feel-good environmentalism. Yesterday's G-8 agreement acknowledged those realities and tolled Kyoto's death knell. Mr. Bush, 1; sanctimonious greens, 0.

I don't know if I'd give Bush all of the credit. He had economic reality on his side, which was a huge help. You already had countries signalling a desire to pull out of Kyoto (like Canada) or declaring they would choose economic growth over emission cuts (like Spain and Ireland). If you think these were the only places on the planet coming face to face with the economic realities of Kyoto you are crazy.

As Strassel put it:

Europeans may be slow, but they aren't silly, and they've quietly come around to some of Mr. Bush's views. Tony Blair has been a leader here, and give him credit for caring enough about his signature issue to evolve. He began picking up Mr. Bush's pro-tech themes years ago, as it became clear just how much damage a Kyoto would do to his country's competitiveness. By the end of 2005, he admitted at a conference in New York that Kyoto was a problem. "I would say probably I'm changing my thinking about this in the past two or three years," he said. "The truth is, no country is going to cut its growth or consumption substantially in the light of a long-term environmental problem." He doubted there would be successor to Kyoto, which expires in 2012, and said an alternative might be "incentives" for businesses. Mr. Bush couldn't have said it better.