Jim Pinkerton has the unreported story that Tony Blair pulled the plug on Kyoto at the leftist lovefest called the Clinton Global Intiative. Here’s what happened:

Onstage with former president Bill Clinton at a midtown Manhattan hotel ballroom, British Prime Minister Tony Blair said he was going to speak with “brutal honesty” about Kyoto and global warming, and he did…
Blair, a longtime supporter of the Kyoto treaty, further prefaced his remarks by noting, “My thinking has changed in the past three or four years.” So what does he think now? “No country, he declared, “is going to cut its growth.” That is, no country is going to allow the Kyoto treaty, or any other such global-warming treaty, to crimp — some say cripple — its economy.
Looking ahead to future climate-change negotiations, Blair said of such fast-growing countries as India and China, “They’re not going to start negotiating another treaty like Kyoto.” India and China, of course, weren’t covered by Kyoto in the first place, which was one of the fatal flaws in the treaty. But now Blair is acknowledging the obvious: that after the current Kyoto treaty — which the US never acceded to — expires in 2012, there’s not going to be another worldwide deal like it.
So what will happen instead? Blair answered: “What countries will do is work together to develop the science and technology….There is no way that we are going to tackle this problem unless we develop the science and technology to do it.” Bingo! That’s what eco-realists have been saying all along, of course — that the only feasible way to deal with the issue of greenhouse gases and global warming is through technological breakthroughs, not draconian cutbacks.
Blair concluded with a rhetorical question-and-answer: “How do we move forward, post-Kyoto? It can only be done by the major players coming together and pooling their resources, to find their way to come together.”

Our Tone has been backtracking on global warming for almost a year, basically since he decided he would make it the centerpiece of Britain’s G8 and EU chairmanships. He’s obviously looked beyond the soundbites and alarmism and concluded that any of the “solutions” to global warming generally proposed would be more harmful to Britain and the world than global warming itself. Well done, Tony. Now if only he’d take that same, detailed look at so many more of his policies.

Meanwhile, a study by the always meticulous Indur Goklany that looks at the real effects of global warming can be found here. Indure concludes:

[O]ver the next few decades the focus of climate policy should be to: (a) broadly advance sustainable development, (b) reduce vulnerabilities to climate-sensitive problems that are urgent today and might be exacerbated by future climate change, and (c) implement “no-regret” policies, such as eliminating subsidies for energy consumption, land conversion and agricultural overproduction in developed countries, while (d) striving to expand the universe of such measures through research and development of cleaner and more affordable technologies. Such a policy would help solve urgent problems facing humanity today while preparing it to face future problems that might be caused or heightened by climate change.

I hope Tony reads Indur’s paper.