Deja vue, all over again.

"After eleven days of negotiations, governments have come up with a compromise deal that could ... even lead to emission increases. ... The highly compromised political deal ... is largely attributable to the position of the United States which was heavily influenced by fossil fuel and automobile industry interests. The failure to reach agreement led to the talks spilling over into an all night session ..."

This is a quote from a George Monbiot article for the Guardian. Is he talking about Bali?

No, this was a Friends of the Earth Press release from 1997.

These are extracts from a press release by Friends of the Earth. So what? Well it was published on December 11th - I mean to say, December 11th 1997. The US had just put a wrecking ball through the Kyoto Protocol. George W Bush was innocent; he was busy executing prisoners in Texas. Its climate negotiators were led by Albert Arnold Gore.

To be a bit more fair to Gore, this was long before the IPCC Third Assessment report and even longer before the fourth.

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