The irrationality behind Europe's new anti-Americanism
Bush and Hot Air
Sorry - but he had little choice over Kyoto.
George W. Bush committed a gaffe last week. A gaffe, as journalist Michael Kinsley once explained, is when a politician tells the truth. The truth is that the Kyoto Accord is now and always has been a dead letter, as far as the United States (and most other developed countries) is concerned. In the high-powered circles of the Euro-elites, these kinds of things are not supposed to be admitted. The whole point of grand international treaties is to affirm great principles, abiding goals, lofty targets – and then do nothing about them. Think of the Soviet Union and the Helsinki Accord. Or most EU countries and EU directives. If any of these countries actually did what they were legally supposed to, the political class would go into some kind of shock. But the important thing is to keep up the pretense, to fly to the next summit meeting, to issue communiqués of increasing complexity and grandeur.
In this regard, Kyoto was a classic. Most international agreements, especially when they include or involve countries from the developing world, are socialistic enterprises. Kyoto was no exception. It exempted from its strictures the developing countries, such as China and India, which are seeing toxic emissions grow at an exponential rate, and focused on Western countries which are alleged to have caused most global pollution in the first place. If you believe in robust defense of national interest, and collective action only when necessary, this kind of selective enforcement is a euphemism for punishing successful suckers. It all but amounts to a penance of breast-beating from the West for daring to be more successful and industrialized than the rest of the world.
Worse, even the gloomiest of environmentalists concede it wouldn't shift temperatures by much more than a trifle, even if completely enforced. And plenty of scientists remain unconvinced by the cruder arguments about global warming blithely embraced by the Kyoto sherpas. When you pit this unfair, barely tangible gain against the extraordinary burden Kyoto would place on the U.S. economy, it's no surprise that, in its only vote on the matter, the U.S. Senate voted 95 – 0 against even considering ratification.
And the closer you look, you see why. At Kyoto, then Vice-President Al Gore agreed to reduce carbon emissions in the United States by 7 percent from their 1990 levels by 20012. Very little so far has been done to achieve that, a period of inertia that applies to the industrialized European countries who have also failed to ratify the treaty. But because economic growth in the United States has far out-stripped growth in Europe in the last decade, carbon dioxide emission levels have also soared beyond the European average. On current trends, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions in 2012 will be some 34 percent higher than in 1990. That means that President Bush and the U.S. Congress would be required under the Kyoto accord to reduce such emissions by over 40 percent in a decade. Apart from locking half the countries' cars in the garage for the next ten years and instructing Americans to stop breathing, it's hard to see how that could possibly be done – without massive economic damage. Bush's position, in other words, is not the result of some crazed Texas oil man wanting to foul up the planet, but the simple recognition of reality. It won't happen. It can't happen. Nor should it.
Bush has been excoriated for this, as most honest politicians are. For eight years, we had a different kind of president – a man who told the world everything it wanted to hear and promised everything that was asked for. He didn't deliver, of course – as any resident of the West Bank or mutilated corpse in Bosnia will attest to. But he played by the rules of the higher flim-flam required by multi-national diplomacy. What you've got with Bush is something quite different: a man who, as I wrote last week, doesn't believe in flattering or lying to his friends, and believes that foreign policy is first and foremost the pursuit of national self-interest. In his early days in international affairs, I can't help but be reminded of the ingenue Margaret Thatcher who shocked her European counterparts in her first summit by asking aggressively for her money back. She forgot that diplomats cannot bear very much reality. Thatcher, for her part, regarded the hooey of international jaw-jaw as so much waste of time. She was right. So is Bush.
Besides, in America right now, all the talk is not of an an evironmental crisis but of an energy crunch. There are rolling blackouts in California, thanks to a classic Third Way partial deregulation of electricity companies. The Department of Energy has estimated that the U.S. needs to build 65 power stations a year just to keep up with electricity needs. Dick Cheney rightly argued recently that nuclear power is the least polluting and most effective way of doing this. In this energy-desperate context, the notion of doubling gas prices, closing down coal-fuelled power-stations, and generally imposing an energy conservation regime that would make Jimmy Carter's look minuscule is politically and economically quixotic. (And don't believe Bush's position is somehow entirely due to the coal industry's campaign money. Bush got twice as much funding from natural gas suppliers, who would benefit by crippling coal-produced energy.)
Is the planet therefore going to bake? The truth is – we don't know. I find evidence of global warming impressive, but the proof of exactly what is causing it is still unclear. You could argue that under those circumstances, we should simply do everything we can to avoid the worst case scenario. But if you weigh the consequences of plunging the United States into an energy crisis against the unknown consequences of a theory that has yet to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, then any politician will have to hesitate. In fact, he'll have no choice. That's why no other industrialized government has yet to ratify Kyoto. Bush's sin is to state the obvious, and take the vilification on the chin.
So get used to it. This administration is not going to be terribly polite. But you'll soon know what it's up to. In North Korea, the Balkans and the Middle East, Bush has already signaled he has no intention of negotiating anything, hugging anyone, or giving Kennedy-esque speeches. With nuclear missile defense, he has simply asserted national independence. Compare that with the early Clinton administration which sent Warren Christopher to Europe to ask them what they wanted the U.S. to do in Bosnia. Those days of insecurity and blather are over. Bush's job, after all, is firstly to defend and protect the interests of the people he represents. It says something about the skewed priorities of our current international order – especially in the undemocratic, higher reaches of the E.U. - that this should seem so shocking.
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