The "Pound Sand" Coalition: Pretty Much Everyone Now

In this self back-patting post, I boil down my long running analysis of the prospects of a new global climate change treaty into the concise cold, hard reality: The world will not derail the slow but undeniable march of rising living standards for a speculative theory that only a few Western elitists believe in.

As the UEACRU Climategate scandal grows, people are speculating whether this will signal the end of climate change action as a policy goal. In theory no, because elitist globo-nannies can hardly be expected to recant, stand down or otherwise admit defeat. However, in practice, it is indeed dead. To my cold, hard bottom line above, you can now append "and looks to be a complete fraud at worst and a scientific project that ought to go back to the drawing board at best." The likes of China, India and Brazil weren't on board before. Now I can't imagine any nation that isn't European or the US would even consider talking about climate change.

UPDATE: Sheesh, if the Aussies - lovable green nutters that they are - are out, the movement's progress is indeed dead in its tracks. They've got a multi-year climb back, if they can even do it.