LET’S JUST PRAY THE EXTRATERRESTRIALS DON’T NOTICE

Political cloud over UN climate conference (Tim Reid, The times, November 28th, 2005)

Of all the days and of all the places to open an international conference on global warming, the world’s environmentalists could hardly have asked for a worse combination: today, in Montreal.

In a perfect storm of bad timing and even worse luck, nearly 200 nations gather in the Canadian city hoping to devise a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

There is just one problem: the Government which is hosting the UN conference — that of Paul Martin, the Liberal Prime Minister — and which has been the driving force behind efforts to build a new international consensus on global warming, is expected to fall in a no-confidence vote.

“It’s the nightmare scenario that environmental activists around the world have been hoping would be avoided,” said Elizabeth May, an executive director of the Sierra Club of Canada, an environmental lobby group.

Indeed, to the dismay of those hoping that today would bring a new dawn in the fight against global warming, there is every chance that Stephane Dion, the Canadian Environment Minister and conference chairman, will no longer be a minister in a Cabinet that no longer exists.

Well, that’s it then. If the Canadian government falls today, the planet is doomed.