Montreal Climate Summit - Day One

From an AP story by Beth Duff-Brown.
Leading environmental groups spent the first hours of the conference blasting Washington for not signing the landmark 1997 agreement that sets targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions around the world.

Elizabeth May of the Sierra Club Canada, however, accused the world's biggest polluter of trying to derail the Kyoto accord, which has been ratified by 140 nations.

"We have a lot of positive, constructive American engagement here in Montreal _ and none of it's from the Bush administration, which represents the single biggest threat to global progress," May said.

Read what The BBC reported here. Evidently, they too felt the need to needle the US noting that environmentalists scoffed at the US claim to have reduced CO2 emissions by .8%

Maybe it's time to get the NGO's out of the process. As I suspected, It's more "Shame on the US, the biggest polluter." Not one word in the articles about France and Germany missing their Kyoto goals.

So far, we have heard from Green Peace and now the Sierra Club. If the MSM was worth a damn, we would know just who and what these organizations are all about. But that's not going to happen. They're more interested in looking at the political angle than they are in actually reporting a story.

For a different story on US efforts to curb emissions, see this website which claims that the US will be vindicated at Montreal with, “The rest of the developed world is now jumping on the bandwagon that the Bush Administration has been driving for more than three years,” Burnett said. “Welcome aboard!”

In addition, the U.S. has spent in excess of $6 billion per year, more than any other government, to create and promote technologies that will reduce emissions yet also promote economic growth. For example:

$700 million in tax credits to promote clean technologies
$3 billion in research into new clean technologies
$200 million to transfer clean technologies to developing countries

“Industry is on course to meet the Bush Administration’s goal of reducing annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 1.5 percent of gross domestic product, and that’s more than can be said for most Kyoto signatory nations,” Burnett added.