"Kyoto's failure haunts new UN talks"

Here.

Excerpt:

In the Kyoto Protocol's accounting of greenhouse gases, the former Eastern bloc is a smashing success.

Russia: Down 29 per cent in carbon dioxide emissions since 1990.

Romania: A 43 per cent reduction.

Latvia: A resounding 60 per cent drop.

Reductions like those across Eastern Europe were the main reason the United Nations was recently able to report a 12 per cent drop in emissions over that period from the accord's industrialised countries.

It was an illusion.

The progress wasn't due to a global embrace of green power, but rather to the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, which shut down smoke-belching factories across the region.

Despite the 1997 Kyoto Protocol's status as the flagship of the fight against climate change, it has been a failure in the hard, expensive work of actually reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Its restrictions have been so gerrymandered that only 36 countries are actually required to limit their pollution. Just over one-third of those-members of the former Eastern bloc-can pollute at will because their limits were set so far above their actual emissions.