Climate Change: Hear the one about the United States having to sacrifice and sign the Kyoto pact if the world is to be saved from global warming? It's turning out to be as bogus as the warming theory itself.
Our European friends have made a lot of noise about the U.S. refusing to commit to the Kyoto accord in which signatory nations are supposed to cut their greenhouse gas emissions to 5% below 1990 levels by 2012.
"Isn't the U.S. an awful country?" a Labor Party member of the British Parliament said some years ago. "With only 5% of the world's population, it produces 20% of those terrible gases that are warming our atmosphere. How dare President Bush say he won't go along with the U.N.'s Kyoto Protocol on global warming."
It was actually Bill Clinton, not George Bush, who was in power when the treaty was signed by Vice President Al Gore in 1997 and who neglected to send it to the Senate for approval. Maybe the Clinton White House decided it wasn't worth the effort since the Senate, recognizing a con game, had passed a resolution 97-0 saying it wouldn't ratify the pact unless developing nations had to follow it as well.
But even without the taskmaster of the Kyoto Protocol, the U.S. is doing a better job of holding down its greenhouse gas emissions than countries that were so eager — for politically correct reasons, of course — to be a party (see chart).
But that's not enough. Critics, both foreign and domestic, want to shackle the U.S. economy far more than they want to stop the threat of global warming. They know they need the hardships imposed by Kyoto to achieve that.
Like most popular causes, global warming is about appearances. The U.S. hasn't been eager to enter into Kyoto, so its results are ignored by the scolds in Europe who wouldn't be able to meet the requirements of the accord even if the U.S. did.
But in the wonderland world of climate change, it's what you believe, not what you do, that counts.
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Friday, May 02, 2008 4:20 PM PT