After years of the conversative and environmentally-unfriendly rule of John Howard, Australians finally voted Howard out and elected the more liberal Kevin Rudd to replace him. Rudd had promised to overturn the country’s policy on global warming and the Kyoto Protocol and so he did last Monday by signing the paperwork necessary to achieve that. Ratification will come into force 90 days after the legal instrument is received by the United Nations and full membership of the Protocol is projected to take place before the end of March 2008.
We applaud the new Australian Prime Minister whose gesture can potentially influence the American negative stance on the Protocol, one of the biggest fiascos in the fight against global warming.
