Sir, - Kevin Myers (An Irishman's Diary, April 3rd) may well be right that the Kyoto Protocol is an exercise in pious posturing and that most of the citizens of the rich Western world have not really thought about the practical consequences of reducing carbon emissions. He is certainly right when he asserts that global warming is not a scientifically proven fact.
But, for all its failings, Kyoto is a first effort by world governments to deal with the salient fact that there are physical limits to human growth on a finite planet. Even if the global warming thesis turns out to be bunkum, even if it turns out that we are not, in the immediate future, facing the limit of the atmosphere's ability to act as a carbon sink, our consumption rate of fossil fuels and many of the earth's other resources is unsustainable.
Kevin Myers is right: many people in the 1970s did make wild, uneducated predictions that the world would run out of oil by the year 2000. This, however, does not change the fact that the world's oil supply is finite and the current rate of consumption is several times greater than the rate of discovery of new reserves. The question is not if we will run out of oil but when.
In walking away from Kyoto, in opening the Alaskan National Wildlife Reserve to oil exploration, George Bush is attempting to ignore this reality. Unless humanity finds a more efficient way to use the earth's energy resources and learns to live within a finite natural economy, it is not a question of if we will face a crisis, but when. - Yours, etc.,
Kevin Sweeney, Kilnaleck, Co Cavan.