Kyoto was a flawed process. There isn't one industrialized country around the world that has ratified that treaty, and so that is a non-starter.
I've been a supporter of green initiatives for years. I've been paying more and more attention to it, you know, with three kids. I thought it was tragic when the Kyoto Protocol was killed by the U.S. It was sort of a call to action.
The obvious issue is providing clean drinking water and sanitation to every single human being on earth at the cost of little more than one year of the Kyoto treaty.
The Kyoto treaty has an estimated cost of between US$150 and $350 billion a year, starting in 2010.
The whole world is moving to Kyoto II, but Australia is not there on the same basis because it is now seen as a delinquent country. Prime Minister Howard has led a delinquency because we signed up, and then we reneged on it. The world will be expecting that next time around as well.
Whether the process proves to be Kyoto or something else, let's acknowledge the urgency of global warming.
To put that into some perspective, when Bill Clinton and Al Gore had first taken the idea of the Kyoto Protocol up to the Congress, the United States Senate voted it down 95 to nothing.
I made a photograph of a garden in Kyoto, the Zen garden, which is a rectangle. But a photograph taken from any one point will not show, well it shows a rectangle, but not with ninety degree angles.
The seas need their own Kyoto Protocol.
It just seems to me that the world's kind of a mess, and the more messy it gets, the more interested I am in escapist fare. Having a good time is something that isn't about the war in Iraq or the Asian flu or the Kyoto protocol - things that are horribly depressing to consider in our real lives. I'm eager to get away from them.
