Key Putin Advisor Slams Britain, Promises To Bury Kyoto - Moscow Times

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President Vladimir Putin's personal adviser on all things economic last week accused British Prime Minister Tony Blair's government of declaring "all-out and total war on Russia" and using "bribes, blackmail and murder threats" to force it to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

In a six-hour diatribe, Andrei Illarionov accused visiting Blair adviser Sir David King, the British government's top scientist, of trying, through pressure from Blair's office and through Foreign Secretary Jack Straw personally, to hijack a two-day conference on the global environmental treaty at the Russian Academy of Sciences. "During the past year have used bribes, blackmail and murder threats to put pressure on Russia, which shows how desperate their case is," Illarionov said without elaborating. "This has not been in the realm of the press, but it had to come out after Sir David King's behavior at the conference," he said.

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Peter Cox, head of the British Meteorological Office's climate, chemistry and ecosystems department, said last week's conference was a publicity stunt by Illarionov, who brought in well-known skeptics to discredit the findings of the International Panel on Climate Control, the basis for Kyoto, Cox said. "The meeting was set up to challenge the IPCC line," he said. "Illarionov hijacked the meeting by inviting people who were outside the IPCC process and who were bitter about that."

Cox said the conference was "like no other" he had ever attended and said he felt very sorry for the Russian scientists that were used as a "rubber stamp for Illarionov's agenda." The academy issued a statement after the conference saying that it found "no scientific basis" for the Kyoto Protocol, and that a warmer Earth is actually positive for Russia."

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http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/07/12/041.html

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