Word: kyoto
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...Although the Clinton administration helped negotiate the treaty and signed it last year, Kyoto has plenty of American critics. Governor George W. Bush for one, who, like his oil industry backers, remains unconvinced of the scientific basis for all this global warming stuff despite the consensus among mainstream scientists. And they complain that developing nations aren't required by Kyoto to do enough, even though everyone agrees that the industrialized countries have created the lion's share of the problem...
...Bush's reservations may well be closer to the popular instinct in the U.S. - after all, it's going to require wrenching, expensive changes in American consumer behavior to achieve the Kyoto target. After all, right now we're going in the opposite direction. Forget about 7 percent below 1990 levels - the government's own Energy Information Agency predicts that at current rates of consumption, U.S. carbon gas emission levels will be 33 percent above 1990 levels by the time the 2010 deadline rolls around...
...surprising, then, that the Clinton administration's approach to the Kyoto climate change treaty has been, from the outset, to dilute and evade it as far as possible. Gore's negotiating team at the 1998 Kyoto talks managed to haggle the Europeans down from requiring a 15 percent reduction from 1990 emission levels to 5 percent. Then, when it came to negotiating how to implement the treaty, one of Washington's pet mechanisms was the trading of pollution rights (countries who fail to meet their own targets could pay other countries to reduce theirs below the required rate, thereby bringing...
...carbon sink" proposal looks set to send any chance of implementing Kyoto down the drain. Instead, it will live on in that guilty limbo where we all store those New Year's resolutions we know we're never going to keep. The Clinton administration may have signed the treaty, but it did so safe in the knowledge that it wouldn't have a prayer in the Senate. After all, Al Gore wasn't about to become the candidate urging Americans to trade in their SUVs for battery-powered cars, and if the Europeans weren't going to accept America...
...aversion to Kyoto is about a lot more than Gore and Bush; there's a cultural issue at work here that cuts to the very heart of the American notion of freedom. People don't want the government fixing things unless they're pretty darn sure that those things are broke. And the relationship between greenhouse gas emissions and climatic catastrophe is far from obvious to the layman. I, for instance, care about global warming, but I don't think about it every time I refill the gas tank of my thirsty old Jeep Wagoneer...