by Richard Morrison
October 8, 2009

Washington, D.C., October 8, 2009—This week the European Union has finally agreed with the Competitive Enterprise Institute that the Kyoto Protocol – the United Nations treaty aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions – has failed. At the UN negotiations in Bangkok this week, European Union spokesman Karl Falkenberg said, “We look at the Kyoto protocol, but since it came into force we have seen emissions increase. It has not decreased emissions.” 

“It’s a few years late, but it’s great to see the European Union finally acknowledge that the Kyoto Protocol has failed,” said Myron Ebell, Director of Energy and Global Warming Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. “CEI said Kyoto couldn’t possibly work after it was first negotiated in 1997, and we have been pointing out ever since that it was failing to reduce emissions and wasting huge sums of money even while failing. As negotiations on a new global warming treaty continue, I hope that when the European Union presents its next hare-brained scheme to save the planet from global warming, people will remember how wrong the EU was about Kyoto.”

CEI Senior Fellow Christopher C. Horner also made a recommendation to U.S. policymakers. “We hope that our own government will now also look at Europe's data, which we have been pointing out in detail prove that the related cap-and-trade and ‘green jobs’ schemes they seek to import here are also enormously costly flops,” said Horner.

Global Warming Experts Available for Interviews
Myron Ebell Director of Energy Policy 202-320-6685 mebell@cei.org	Christopher C. Horner Senior Fellow 202-262-4458 chorner@cei.org
Marlo Lewis Senior Fellow 202-669-6693 mlewis@cei.org	Julie Walsh Global Warming Policy Analyst 202-331-2266 jwalsh@cei.org

CEI is a non-profit, non-partisan public policy group dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government.  For more information about CEI, please visit us at www.cei.org.