A flawed approach, based on flawed "science" has finally been recognized, even by its participants, to be a sham.
At the COP 10 in Buenos Aires, Italy has announced that it will withdraw from Kyoto when it expires in 2012. It's likely that Canada, Japan and Russia (who joined only to make MILLIONS selling emissions credits that it can't currently use itself) will also withdraw, and Spain is seen as likely pulling out.
Before the "Blame America First, Last and Always" herd gets to bleating that Kyoto's failure is b/c the US wouldn't hop aboard this trainwreck, read
this and
this (they're not very long).
My favorite quote from the latter (affirming all things ludicrous in the academic and scientific "green" communities):
The proponents of the man-made global warming hypothesis often argue that 'the science is settled' and 'all scientists agree'. This is simply not true. In personal debates between them and climate sceptics, they often challenge the latter to publish their views in peer-reviewed journals. Many sceptics, however, share the experience that they have been denied access to these journals, or that they had to meet scientific standards which by far exceeded those which were applied to papers of their less iconoclastic colleagues. Nevertheless, the body of climate sceptical literature has been growing dramatically over the years. But one can hardly escape the feeling that the pro-Kyoto scientists are ignoring contrary views, perhaps because they labour under a serious form of cognitive dissonance. Timo Hämeranta deserves credit for drawing up a list of hundreds of scientific peer-reviewed papers, other scientific papers, overviews, presentations and books. He also draws some very pertinent conclusions from the overview of the sceptical literature: 'The scientific basis to tackle the climate change allegedly caused by human-induced CO2 emissions has collapsed. The newest scientific findings prove that current or near-future (i.e. in the next 100 yrs) CO2 emissions cause no dangerous anthropogenic interference with or dangerous perturbation in the climate system.'
It looks like the Kyoto disciples are coming around to the US' (and the G77's) way of looking at things...
JP