The Kyoto Protocol: …

The Kyoto Protocol: So much promise, so little delivery.

New Zealand’s government is being challenged to justify the country’s continued participation in the Kyoto Protocol after it admitted that complying with the climate change treaty will cost taxpayers about one billion NZ dollars (U.S. $714 million).

The news has rattled New Zealanders, who previously were led to believe that participating in Kyoto would earn the country millions of dollars in carbon “credits.”

The admission is a blow for a left-leaning, green-friendly government, which last month announced that one of the world’s first carbon tax regimes — entailing higher prices for gas, electricity and coal — would come into effect in 2007.

The opposition center-right National Party has called for an immediate formal review of the country’s participation in Kyoto, accusing the Labor government of a major policy blunder.

“They were so intent on looking good to their socialist friends in Europe that they forgot the enormous cost to New Zealand taxpayers,” National leader Don Brash told lawmakers in Wellington.

A few points:

• New Zealand–the home of “Middle Earth” in the movie “Lord of the Rings”–isn’t clean enough for Kyoto, and it’s going to soak them. Imagine if we were still a part of that. The claims that it would kill our economy are a lot more plausible now.
• Once again, politicians oversold a government program (in this case, a huge multi-government program), and it cost more than anticipated. This is not surprising, and should be well understood before listening to folks sing the praises of the protocol.

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