Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Kyota's competitive disadvantage works ti benefit US, Oz, India, China, Japan and South Korea

The Australian:

FOR its mostly European supporters, the Kyoto greenhouse treaty's time surely had come.

In November last year, a diplomatic coup delivered Russia into the climate-change treaty's arms.

A month later, greenhouse representatives of 194 nations were gathered in Buenos Aires to lay the ground for an even more ambitious "son of Kyoto".

But Jim Connaughton had other ideas. The director of environmental policy in George W.Bush's White House quietly floated the idea of an Asia-Pacific regional climate alliance that would sideline the Europeans' Kyoto dream.

The balding and bespectacled Connaughton knew that Russia's ratification would bring the protocol into force, leaving Australia and the US -- who both refused to sign the agreement -- out in the cold.

The first stage of the Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012 and the Europeans were keen to draw developing nations into a new agreement to offset the competitive disadvantage the existing treaty imposes on members.

The European Union had been working hard among members of the Group of 77 developing countries, and their previous blanket opposition to binding targets was softening.

But Connaughton and the US undersecretary of state for global affairs, Paula Doriansky, had been doing their own lobbying.

China and India both split from other developing nations to join the US in opposing new negotiations on a replacement for Kyoto. With China, India, the US and Australia opposed, there was no consensus for new negotiations.

The conference fizzled out. It was the chance the US was looking for.

Connaughton's office began fleshing out a pact that would focus on efficient use of technology rather than the binding targets of Kyoto.

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Kyoto would only cover 20per cent of global emissions by 2020, they said, and the only path to tackle long-term climate risks was the development of low greenhouse gas emission technologies.

China and India would be able to deliver real reductions in global emissions with the use of good technology, whereas they would never agree to curtail their development under Kyoto's quantitative emission limits. But they gave no hint the ideas they were expressing were the template for a new greenhouse agreement already under intensive negotiation.

President Bush has made it clear that he rejected Kyoto because it would harm the US economy. What this agreement does is attract other countries to the use of US technology to address the problem, rather than crippling of the economy of developing countries and the US. The Europeans have locked themselves into an agreement guaranteeing their competitive disadvantage, if they live up to their agreement. As they fall further behind, I predict they will bail on Kyoto.