How much damage can Al Gore do to the world's economy?

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Amidst her welcome critique of the biofuel mania, Vandana Shiva's ZNet commentary last month (December 13, 2007) also made this point: "The Kyoto Protocol totally avoided the material challenge of stopping activities that lead to higher emissions and the political challenge of regulation of the polluters and making the polluters pay in accordance with principles adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio. Instead, Kyoto put in place the mechanism of emissions trading which in effect rewarded the polluters by assigning them rights to the atmosphere and trading in these rights to pollute."

Indeed in 1997 at Kyoto, Al Gore bamboozled negotiators into adopting carbon trading as a central climate strategy in exchange for Washington's support -- which never materialized.

Likewise last month's Kyoto Conference of Parties in Bali allowed the "everyone v. the USA" debate to obscure much more durable problems. Even many environmentalists and well-meaning citizens think that building on Kyoto is the correct strategy for post-Bali negotiations.