PROLIFE is right, Bush never indicated that he would ratify Kyoto. Do a search; you won't find any evidence that he ever promised to sign the agreement.
siliconinvestor.com
Ignore the spin. Focus on free trade
By RAY EVANS
Monday 2 April 2001
President Bush has shown courage and provided world leadership by announcing that the United States will not support the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse gas emissions.
What is baffling, however, is that some senior members of the Australian Government do not seem prepared to immediately lend support to Bush. In the interests of good policy and good science, they should do so.
The battle during the past month within the Bush administration over the US position on Kyoto has been of epic proportions.
During the presidential election campaign late last year, Governor George W. Bush questioned the science behind Kyoto, and emphasised the economic costs of implementation. His Democrat opponent, Al Gore, strenuously defended the science and insisted that implementing Kyoto would be good for the US economy.
At the time, rising petrol prices were a major political issue in the US. However, inserted into Bush's campaign manifesto on energy policy was an unnoticed promise to regulate emissions from power stations - not only of sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxides and mercury, but also of carbon dioxide. The only justification that could be used to place carbon dioxide on this list was its alleged role as a greenhouse gas and an anthropogenic contributor to predicted global warming.
This surreptitious insertion caused a huge row within the Bush camp, but, for fear of losing the election, the row was kept out of the public arena.
After the election, when the new President's State of the Union address was being drafted, the dispute between the pro and anti-Kyoto camps flared again. As in the election campaign, a commitment to regulating carbon dioxide was in the draft. This time a very public campaign, carried out within the Republican Party, persuaded the President to delete the proposal.
Nevertheless, before the State of the Union address was delivered to Congress, the new EPA Administrator, Christie Todd Whitman, had gone public in support of Kyoto and held to this position at a meeting in Trieste of environment ministers from the Group of Eight leading industrialised countries.
Four senior Republican senators then entered the debate and sent a letter (on March 6) to the President asking where he stood on Kyoto. This letter put the issue at the top of the President's in-tray, and he replied a week later, resiling from his pre-election proposal to regulate carbon dioxide, stating his continuing opposition to Kyoto and reaffirming his commitment to regulating power-station emissions of mercury, sulphur dioxides and nitrous oxides.
The upshot of all of this is that Kyoto is dead. The Europeans say they will go ahead and ratify Kyoto without the US. But no one, other than committed Kyoto enthusiasts, believes them.
Australia's Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, when asked where Australia stood on Kyoto after the Bush decision became known, enthusiastically supported the US President. But the Environment Minister, Robert Hill, has announced he will go to Washington to lobby the Bush administration to reverse its position.
What needs to be remembered is that the Australian Government's attitude towards the President's position on Kyoto does not stand by itself in the Australia-US relationship.
The most important current issue in this relationship is the Australia-US Free Trade Agreement proposal, which has the enthusiastic support of the Prime Minister. As well it might. If John Howard can go to the electorate late this year with even half a commitment from President Bush on this proposal, he will have earnt his place in Australian history. The value to Australia of a free-trade agreement that includes agriculture would rank with the ANZUS Treaty in the history of Australia-US relations.
Within the Bush administration are a number of senior figures, most notably Vice-President Dick Cheney, who are well informed on the science debate concerning greenhouse and are well aware that the often-quoted United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is more interested in spin than in science.
They are also aware of the recent discovery of a heat-venting mechanism caused by cloud behavior over the Pacific Ocean, which acts as a global temperature regulator and may well explain why tropospheric temperatures have not risen since the satellite record began in 1979.
If Robert Hill persists in his ambition to add to the clamor in Washington on the President's Kyoto decision, he will do very considerable damage to our standing within the Bush administration.
If we are to break through on the Australia-US free-trade agreement, we need every friendly voice, every helpful telephone call.
The Prime Minister now has to act. Otherwise Australia will not be taken seriously in Washington.
Ray Evans is secretary of The Lavoisier Group, a society to promote debate on global warming.
E-mail: ray.evans@wmc.com |
