Leigh, you say that "The greenies have been crying wolf for too long, ensuring total apathy about the whole thing."
Another perspective is that the Greenies have been drawing attention to it for so long because it is so important and yet people continue to ignore the situation.

I agree that leaving it to big business to sort it without creating pricing incentives for example is unrealistic.
I imagine it is not naivety however, that leads the Government to this decision however, they may be foolish, but not stupid.

I'm astounded that people are still trying to deny that global warming is happening. The vast majority of climatologists say that it is real and it is caused by human activity, and they have been saying so for quite a few years. In fact, the rate of warming is larger than expected. See the recent Reuters article "Global warming demands urgent solutions: scientists" for example:

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsarticle.aspx?type=scienceNews&storyid=2006-01-30T224240Z_01_MOL760618_RTRUKOC_0_US-ENVIRONMENT-CLIMATE-SCIENTISTS.xml

gecko,
I think I can see where you are going wrong:

I'll bet you are still working with a couple of 20th century concepts

1. Logic

2. Common sense

Get with the times, Big Business is our friend, we can trust them to self regulate, Big Business.....say it enough and you may convice yourself, which is what some other posters would like...

Regards, Shaun

Sams said: "I'm astounded that people are still trying to deny that global warming is happening."

- Perhaps you need to read more widely: http://www.nationalcenter.org/Kyoto.html

Winston-
Was that the most convincing response you could come up with?
The link you provided gave access to a site with only 2 statements on it – not convincing!
Particularly when the main statement is made by someone with training in engineering and physics – this hardly qualifies them as a climate change expert! The second statement is followed by a list of unknown signatories, with no qulifications provided.

So that you dont appear so silly in future when espousing views of supposed experts, you may want to look at some of the following sites published by independent scientists(who actually have their qualifications listed):
www.worldwatch.org
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/Independent-scientist.php
www.ucsusa.org
www.environs.org.au

For anyone else who follows the link to http://www.nationalcenter.org/Kyoto.html, it actually contains about 40-odd links to blogs; a further 70 or so to papers by experts and non-experts; 3 to Global Warming Summits; and about 35 to archived pre-2001 papers.

You just need to scroll down the page a little and run your mouse over the sub-headings.