Toronto Star: Obama will let us off the Kyoto hook

TheStar.com | Ideas | Obama will let us off the Kyoto hook:

"Prime Minister Stephen Harper must be pinching himself over his great luck.

One day, he's isolated with the reviled George W. Bush as a pariah of climate change. The next, he's shoulder to shoulder on the issue with the most popular politician on the planet.

All without having to lift a finger. American voters did him the favour by making Barack Obama their president-elect. Obama pledges to act on climate change, and after eight years of American obstructionism, 're-engage' with the international negotiations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

His administration will 'work constructively' within the United Nations process aimed at putting the Kyoto Protocol into practice. He proposes a firm target for reducing emissions. He promises an ambitious list of measures to achieve that goal, including a cap-and-trade system far tougher than any attempted elsewhere.

But a crucial outcome of all this – for Harper and the world – is that the Protocol is dead."