We’ve certainly seen the media manifest a lack of awareness of basic facts surrounding the Kyoto Protocol and climate-related issues generally, and it is nothing new to find them a little behind the curve – for example, the recent NYT recognition that scientists think Al Gore is an alarmist. But that piece’s lag of fifteen-months or so is nothing compared to this story.

“The recent economic slowdown in the former Soviet republics and former East bloc nations” – that is, the one that began with the transition from Soviet-style communism to a liberal market economy ca. 1990 – has left these countries with “greenhouse gas credits” they can sell to countries blessed not with such a surplus, if quite rich in the kind of central-planning and rationing that over the longer-term tends to create such surpluses.

It does seem that if more people took such a long view of things as this reporter there would be fewer of the millions susceptible to alarmism over a decade-or-three’s cooling, now warming, as “proof!” of millennia-long geophysical processes reacting one way or another to the human stimulus.

Still, note in addition to Kyoto Jobs this particular twist on Europe’s newest export: economic failure. Get a piece of the (in)action while it’s hot…so to speak.