And more Kyoto:
Message 15615707
and
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.
andrewsullivan.com
SO: why have the Europeans been excoriating us so bitterly for ignoring Kyoto? If they love this treaty so much, why haven't THEY ratified it?
Or is the purpose simply to destroy the US so they can once again gain world domination? |
