Global Warming Treaty Set to Take Effect

First the news, then some perspective.

This from the AP: "NEW YORK (AP) - After seven politically painful years, the Kyoto Protocol finally enters into force on Wednesday, reining in industrial emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" in a first attempt to control climate change.

The global pact negotiated in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, remains a small step, potentially eliminating only one-tenth of a projected 30 percent rise in worldwide emissions between 1990 and 2010. Its supporters already are looking beyond it, toward bigger steps once the agreement expires in 2012.

Progress will be limited without the United States, however. The world's biggest emitter rejects the Kyoto pact and balks at discussing future mandatory cuts. European environment ministers, key Kyoto supporters, say they will step up efforts this year to win Washington over."

President Bush is often accused of wrecking the environment because he pulled the US out of Kyoto. Let's examine the facts: According to Jean-Francois Revel (he's French mind you) in his book, "Anti-Americanism", "Already in 1997, with Bill Clinton occupying the White House, the US Senate had rejected the Kyoto Protocol by a vote of 95 to 0...President Bush had nothing to do with it."

Revel sites this situation as politically sticky and nearly impossible. He says in his book that, "Here, Clinton's evident intention was to hand Bush a political hot potato at the last minute. If he accepted it, the incoming president would be faced with the problem of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2 percent without cutting back industrial production and energy consumption too drastically: an impossible task."

Many American citizens, especially liberals, and Europeans, both in the public and their respective governments point to the Bush administration and cry negligence over the environment. Here's the irony of that according to Revel, "By mid-2001, four years after the Kyoto conference, not one of the 167 other signatories - and not a single European nation - had ratified the protocol."

Lest anyone think that the above statement is irrelevant because we are such wanton polluters, Revel writes, "...nations that are heavy polluters - such as Brazil, China and India - demand that the United States apply restrictions that they themselves don't feel required to observe. In a report published on May 29, 2001, the European Environment Agency noted a worsening of pollution in Europe, mainly because 'transportation is constantly increasing, in particular those modes that are least sustainable (road and air).' "

But wait, this gets better, "Ecologists (say)...that America, with 5 percent of the world's population, is responsible for 25 percent of the world's industrial pollution...but it should be pointed out that America also produces 25 percent of the planet's goods and services, and that the other 167 Kyoto signatories had none absolutely nothing by mid-2001 towards reducing, either collectively or individually, their 75 percent share of world pollution."

This is why I can't take arguments by environmentalists seriously. I'm not saying the Bush administration is without sin. If they were I doubt Christie Todd Whitman would have quit the EPA in Bush's first term. What I am saying is that we should not be shouldering the blame alone as we are not alone in polluting the world. This business in Kyoto is simply a red herring that is throw out into the public forum for the purposes of smearing the Bush administration.

The above line about progress being limited by the US is a joke. Progress will be limited because countries around the world are less serious than the US in environmental matters. They are high on rhetoric, low on action. How positively European.