Here's a good one from the London (Sunday Times) paper:
April 1 2001 OPINION
Andrew Sullivan
Why George W is right to
reject Kyoto
George W Bush committed a gaffe last week. A gaffe, as the 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 accords. 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 pretence.
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 defence 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 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 American economy, it's no surprise that, in its only vote on the matter, the Senate voted 95-0 against even considering ratification.
And the closer you look, you see why. At Kyoto, Vice-President Al Gore agreed to reduce carbon emissions in the United States by 7% from their 1990 levels by 2012. Very little so far has been done to achieve that, a period of inertia that applies to the industrialised European countries which have also failed to ratify the treaty. But because economic growth in America has far outstripped growth in Europe in the past decade, carbon dioxide emission levels have soared beyond the European average.
On current trends, American carbon dioxide emissions in 2012 will be some 34% higher than in 1990. That means that President Bush and the Congress would be required under the Kyoto accord to reduce such emissions by more than 40% in a decade.
Apart from locking half the country's cars in the garage for the next 10 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 oilman 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. He didn't deliver, of course, but he played by the rules of multinational diplomacy.
What you've got with Bush is something different: a man who, as I wrote last week, doesn't believe in flattering or lying to his friends, and believes 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 ingénue 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.
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 proved beyond a reasonable doubt, then any politician will have to hesitate. 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 polite. But you'll soon know what it's up to. The days of blather are over. Bush's job, after all, is first 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 EU - that this should seem so shocking.
sunday-times.co.uk |
