Climate change and Kyoto have simply become totems in the larger anti-Bush struggle. When he is gone the rhetoric will calm, the world will get used to the idea that, like 155 other countries including China, India, Mexico, South Korea and Brazil, under no president will the U.S. ratify a global pact rationing greenhouse emissions. This is particularly true regarding a regime with such a miserable record already, with its perverse incentives, economic cost and, frankly, the pervasive cheating.
Even a scaled-back and solely domestic replication of Kyoto would simply be a smaller mistake on the road to the same disastrous goal of ensuring energy poverty and economic outsourcing in the developed world. Yet given as the longstanding goal of a vocal and powerful yet tiny minority, Congress is now making loud noises about doing just that. A cadre of Wall Street insiders within the administration is also urging such action, Wall Street standing to gain greatly under this scheme at consumers' expense. That, too, is a current European reality that must be brought to the fore of the debate.
There remains time. The Democrat majority see no need to rush "climate change" off the stage before the 2008 elections, given the free pass they are granted on the issue in no small part to the administration's reluctance to fight back. President Bush failed to right the rhetorical ship on climate change in his State of the Union address, though fortunately he volunteered nothing to deepen the policy conundrum. The administration must articulate the facts of superior U.S. emissions performance to avoid the absurd outcome of leaping onto a sinking policy ship, leaving behind the most successful approach in a futile struggle for elite approval.
Don't forget when the U.S. Senate had the opportunity to vote on Kyoto, they went 97-0 against it. The drive-by media likes to obscure that fact.
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