Yeah, I was glad to hear this news too.
However, without the world's biggest polluter signing up, things aren't going to improve much, if at all. The Protocols give signatory states about ten years to reduce the rate of pollution to turn-of-the-millennium levels. So each current government can pass the buck, doing nothing about it at all because it'll be someone else's responsibility.

But it's a start, at least. Enough countries have finally agreed that the life of the planet is a little more valuable than our God-given right to deplete fossil fuels and increase carbon monoxide emission rates.

Someone should tell Bush that oil's running out... no wait. I dount that'd hold him back. No developed country is going to make a serious attempt to develop alternative fuel sources, not while petroleum's still so relatively abundant and commercially viable. Oh hell no. Creating something new, better, cleaner would cost money, thus the corporates would sooner see us all die than make the investment they're gonna have to make someday. Nothing's going to change until petrol power becomes too expensive to be feasible; then they'll finally start making genuine efforts to develop hydrogen fuel cells on a big scale. I mean genuine efforts, not the token (obscene) gesture they're flinging at us now.

Hydrogen fuel cells have been around since the 60s; if the companies actually gave a rat's about developing them, they'd have been in widespread use since the 70s, easily.

'Tis all about the money, folks; until our lives are worth something, others will have no qualms about throwing them away.

Mmm, carcinogens.