A VERY "Realpolitik" Analysis of the Global Warming Debate

John Rosenthal, writing in the Weekly Standard, offers up this damning article on Germany's negotiations on various climate change agreements. In sum, he points out that one of the main rationales for using 1990 as a benchmark year for carbon emissions was that it gave European nations as well as Australia, a profound advantage. Why? Well, much of Germany's post-1990 carbon reduction is the result of shuttering extraordinarily filthy and inefficient East German industries. France, because the majority of its power is generated by nuclear reactors, is also well below any targets, and Australia, which signed on to Kyoto only after John Howard left, was allowed to use its 1990 brush-clearing exercises (basically, burning the Outback) as "emissions" in order to set its benchmark substantially higher than it would have been had the nation only measured its industrial emissions.
In sum, Rosenthal makes a compelling case both against Kyoto (and its Copenhagen successor), and the tactics of negotiation on all sides. Whether European leaders believe in their hearts that emissions lead to climate change is irrelevant to the fact that these treaties would be disproportionately devastating for the USA, and likely would have turned out much differently if they were negotiated with a view to the future, rather than cynically abusing the past.