Thomas Friedman's column in today's New York Times bashes President Bush for his "decision to pull the U.S. out of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which called for industrialized nations to steadily reduce their carbon dioxide emissions." Mr. Friedman reports that Mr. Bush "bowed to the oil companies and pulled the U.S. out of Kyoto." The column refers to "what Mr. Bush did in trashing Kyoto."
The Kyoto Protocol was trashed as far as the U.S. was concerned long before Mr. Bush got to the White House. On July 25, 1997, the U.S. Senate voted 95-0 in favor of the Byrd-Hagel resolution instructing U.S. negotiators that any greenhouse gas reduction agreement must apply to developing countries as well as to industrialized nations such as America. The actual Kyoto agreement violated these instructions. On January 30, 1998, the executive committee of the AFL-CIO passed a resolution calling on President Clinton "to refrain from signing the proposed Kyoto Protocol to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change." On July 18, 2000, the Senate passed, 97-2, an Interior Appropriations bill that included a ban on the use of any of the money to implement the Kyoto Protocol. The Clinton-Gore administration never even submitted the Kyoto Protocol for ratification by the Senate, even while it went through the motions of continuing the Kyoto "process" and trying to modify the treaty.
Continuing Crisis: The lead editorial in today's New York Times refers to "Californians facing a summer of crisis." The second editorial is headlined "Crisis in the Clinics." And a front-page article about electricity regulation in New York ends with a quote from a vice president of a Buffalo brass mill who says, "I want everyone to understand that this is a crisis." There's a crisis emerging over the over-use of the word crisis.