The US and Kyoto

A British think-tank has figured out how to stop the US from benefiting from its abandonment of the Kyoto Protocol: tax 'em.

At the moment, countries which cut carbon emissions by e.g. imposing a carbon tax or tradable emissions regime run the risk of being at a competitive disadvantage compared to countries who externalise their costs and pollute. The solution is to impose carbon taxes on imports produced in non-Kyoto compliant regimes, thus providing both an incentive for governments to comply, and eliminating their unfair advantage if they don't.

(But the best bit of the article is the think-tank spokesman saying that "there is only a certain amount of time people can go around behaving like teenagers who don't have to care about anybody else". This is both a sadly accurate description of US foreign policy, and indeed of most of our local right-wing bloggers...)