I do enjoy these types of editorials up to a point…my comments are in italics [I hope]. But if I’ve missed a SI formatting character string my apologies. I’m sure you’ll be able to sort it out.
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. Always start off with a lofty word for your position and a pejorative on the other position, e.g., the truth vs. Euro-elites. Sets the tone straight away. Very nice “definition” skills as well. Everyone knows that Bush made a gaffe; now redefine gaffe as the “truth”. Hopefully, the reader will have overlooked or forgotten that the gaffe was that Bush told Schroeder that things had changed since the election and consequently he was no longer able to support Kyoto; combined with the Administration telling the allies just a few days earlier that we would be working with Kyoto. 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. Start off with the premise that all international agreements are pointless. Think of one specific agreement and then be vague and general about the rest. For example, “most EU directives”. Do you really think that Mr. Sullivan has assessed every single EU directive regarding their effectiveness to be able to accurately offer a claim of “most”? I’m skeptical. But let’s suppose he did. Then he contradicts himself, since the purpose was to affirm great principles and then do nothing about them. There were therefore at least some EU agreements that something was done. I wonder if the Start or Salt agreements fall into his category of lofty goals where nothing was done.
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. Sneak in another pejorative; no one wants socialism. It exempted from its strictures the developing countries, such
as China and India, which are seeing toxic emissions grow at an exponential rate<i, 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. Note the use of the word “alleged”…suggests that we might not really know that the industrialized have contributed the large proportion of greenhouse gases over the last 100 years. If you believe in robust defense of national interest [alternatively, if you believe in motherhood and apple pie] then it’s punishing successful suckers. Let’s see…if I have a lot of money and I throw my trash around the street and get a ticket for littering then I’m being punished for being successful. I’ve got it.
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. Very good use of wording here…trifle, or barely tangible [makes it sound insignificant, though IMO, if global warming stayed right were it is, that would be a huge success]; sherpas: definitely a new word for me. I had to look it up. I have absolutely no idea what it has to do with the subject other than it has a nice ridiculing sound to it; plenty: What’s plenty? 100? 92? 100 out of 14,000. I don’t know the numbers and I expect neither does he; US Senate votes 95-0; we have numbers! And fortunately, we all know that the Senate would only vote in a manner based on scientific evidence without any political considerations what so ever. I’m sure we all can agree on that point. [cough, cough] As an aside, we have the CA governors and Legislature on that deregulation thing. They must have been right
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. So the argument goes: we’ve done nothing for the last decade and we won’t do anything for the next decade therefore we shouldn’t do anything at all. To reduce such admissions we’ll have to instruct Americans not to breathe. That certainly proves to me that we shouldn’t do anything and how silly Kyoto is.
Bush has been excoriated for this, as most honest politicians are. There we go with the honest thing again. 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 sure he believes in lying; see the comments on Schroeder and Kyoto above. Alternatively, we could go with the thought that Schroeder is not his friend, so it’s ok to lie., and believes that foreign policy is first and
foremost the pursuit of national self-interestMotherhood and apple pie again. What happened to the word robust. He used that earlier. Robust national self interest is better than just national self-interest. It perhaps is a question of how one defines the pursuit of national self-interest. If you’re willing to sacrifice the coastal areas of the US long after your name is forgotten near term economic goals as your criteria of national self-interest then you’re pursuing 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 hooey….jaw-jaw?. This man certainly has expertise in the use of the English language. I don’t think he has to worry about being accused of being Kennedy-esque 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. Wonderful. If nothing else, let’s not support the Kyoto Protocol because it’s not the talk of the town.
I have to quit at this point. I can’t stand it anymore. This editorial is so flawed, logically and factually it’s a joke as a journalist piece. I’ve addressed some of them above and there are more even above that I could have addressed, but didn’t take the time. I wasn’t familiar with the writings of Andrew Sullivan before. I suggest you take him off your reading list. He’s already taken far too much of my time.
On: Or is the purpose simply to destroy the US so they can once again gain world domination?
Are we back to the American Empire thing again? You may be consuming illegal substances without being aware of it. |
