The Anti-Kyoto Vision Statement

The Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate, or, as one blogger put it, APP4CDC, has offered this noble-sounding, if impossibly long, vision statement. Note in the fifith and sixth paragraphs the goal to reduce “greenhouse gas intensities,” not gross output.

Reducing per capita greenhouse gas emissions is an essential goal, but if we cannot contain the actual amount of greenhouse gases we loft into the atmosphere, we will continue to make climate trouble that we are incapable of managing. We are – to strain an old metaphor – already “a little bit pregnant” on this issue; it’s time we stopped fooling around.