Someone has written a sensible article in the NYT claiming to be Andrew Revkin, but Revkin would never say sensible things like this.

Today, in the middle of new global warming talks in Montreal, there is a sense that the whole idea of global agreements to cut greenhouse gases won't work. . .

in the years after the protocol was announced, developing countries, including the fast-growing giants China and India, have held firm on their insistence that they would accept no emissions cuts, even though they are likely to be the world's dominant source of greenhouse gases in coming years.

Their refusal helped fuel strong opposition to the treaty in the United States Senate and its eventual rejection by President Bush. . .

Some veterans of climate diplomacy and science now say that perhaps the entire architecture of the climate treaty process might be flawed.

The basic template came out of the first international pact intended to protect the atmosphere, the 1987 Montreal Protocol for eliminating chemicals that harmed the ozone layer, said Richard A. Benedick, the Reagan administration's chief representative in the talks leading to that agreement.

That agreement was a success, but a misleading one in the context of climate. It led, Mr. Benedick now says, to "years wasted in these annual shindigs designed to generate sound bites instead of sober contemplation of difficult issues."

While it was relatively easy to phase out ozone-harming chemicals, called chlorofluorocarbons, which were made by a handful of companies in a few countries, taking on carbon dioxide, the main climate threat, was a completely different matter, he said.

The only real answer at the moment is still far out on the horizon: nonpolluting energy sources. But the amount of money being devoted to research and develop such technologies, much less install them, is nowhere near the scale of the problem, many experts on energy technology said.

Now I realize that Revkin, or whoever wrote that, was simply quoting other people such as Benedick, but normally he would have spun like crazy and inserted all sorts of contradictory boilerplate.

See Treaty Foo for a similar analysis from the dim past. The failure of the Kyoto concept - trying to apply a solution like the Montreal CFC Protocol to a very different type of problem - has long been discussed by those who actually cared about climate change. That this is being discussed now, in this context, by Revkin, seems significant. It may be that the Kyoto nutters are beginning to think.

See Works A Treat for discussion of international climate related agreements that do work, and Patooie Spirit for discussion of the insanity we are emerging from if those in Montreal now do truly grasp the defects of their plans.