COP7: little Ado about not much of anything.

If you missed the reports about the Seventh Conference of the Parties to the Climate Change Convention (COP7 in bureaucrat jargon), held in Morocco in November, don't fret. These meetings have devolved to little more than a rash of political posturing in the face of the Bush Administration's continued stance against the Kyoto Protocol and increased recognition that the drastic energy cuts required by the treaty would harm economies.

You may recall that the Kyoto Protocol set the rules for the 1992 Rio Treaty in which hundreds of countries pledged to reduce carbon dioxide and other emissions which seem to warm the atmosphere. While scientists still struggle to find exactly how that climactic atmospheric change occurs and how much warming we can actually expect (and what it means in terms of benefits, such as more abundant food crops, as well as risks), politicians and globocrats still meet annually and semi-annually (and sometimes semi-semi-annually) to write the rules which govern the rules written to implement the treaty if and when it ever goes into force.

The main two new rules that seem to have emerged are: 1) Russia gets double the credit they were to receive for their carbon "sinks" -- forests which absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere -- as previously planned (US negotiators in 2000 couldn't get the Europeans to budge on any such concessions for America). Russia also is not required and doesn't have to actually inventory or verify such credits -- which they can sell to other countries, presumably those in the European Union, which don't cut emissions "enough"; and 2) Japan can ratify the Protocol and not explain how they'll reach the emissions cut until after that.

Delegates promised that they'd really, really, for sure finish writing the rules at their next meeting in 2002, which may or may not be in India.