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That theme was reinforced on March 18 by White House chief economic advisor Laurence Lindsey in a Meet the Press interview. "We have a major energy crisis ... We have a choice in this country of having the lights on or, at least in the short run, having more carbon dioxide,'' Lindsey said.

Bush won't jeopardize America

In making the announcement on March 27, Whitman said there was too much opposition in Congress and that no industrialized nation had signed it. "What we need to discuss is if we think there is a real concern here — if there is general agreement that we need to be addressing global climate change issues — how do we do it in a way that makes some progress instead of spending our time committed to something that isn't going to go, not just in this country, but at this point in every other industrialized country that's dealt with it,'' Whitman said. No other developed nation affected by the treaty has ratified it.

The fact that coal-fired power plants make up more than 50 percent of our energy production and emit far more CO₂ than the newer gas-powered plants played a large role in Bush's decision. White House chief economist Lindsey said on March 18 the country's energy woes — including shortages and high prices — were caused by a failure to build infrastructure, especially in natural gas distribution and generating facilities. "We need more refineries, we need more power plants, we need more pipelines,'' he said. This infrastructure simply was not built when they should have been. Why? Because of environmental regulations contrived to prevent their construction (See Editor's Commentary, next page). Yet, the Kyoto Protocol cannot be met without them being in place.

The London Electronic Telegraph reported that during a meeting with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder on March 29, Bush said, "The idea that somehow we are supposed to get enormous amounts of natural gas on line immediately to be able to conform to a treaty that our own Senate sent a very overwhelming message against, and that many other countries haven't signed, makes no economic sense. It makes no common sense." Later in the meeting Bush said, "I will not accept anything that will harm our economy and hurt our workers. We have an energy shortage."

The treaty would cripple America

The US Senate had already voted 95-0 in 1997 on a resolution to reject what later became the Kyoto Protocol. The Senate said it would not ratify any treaty that did not include all nations contributing to global warming. The Kyoto Protocol commits 38 industrialized nations to cut their emissions of the main gases produced by human activities, which are blamed for climate change. By 2012, they would have to cut emissions by an average of 5.2% on their 1990 levels, and the US by 7%. The Senate demanded that developing nations also be included since it is a well known fact that most increases in CO₂ output will come from those sources.

The Senate resolution also said it would not vote for the proposed treaty because it would cause economic damage to the US. In 1998 the prestigious WEFA international consulting group analyzed what the treaty would do and found:

• It would nearly double energy and electricity prices

• Cost 2.4 million US jobs and reduce US total output $300 billion (1992$) annually, 3.2 percent below baseline Gross Domestic Product projections

• Harm US competitiveness as cost of production increases due to regulations not suffered by competing developing nations like China, Mexico, Brazil and others

• Reduce the average annual household income nearly $2700 at the same time the cost of products would be sharply increasing

• Reduce state tax revenues by $93.1 billion due to job and output loses

Europe "outraged" over announcement

Predictably the press, especially in Europe, have demonized Bush's decision. "America is now confirmed as the unrepentant outlaw, the dirty man of environmental politics," howled The London Guardian Unlimited on March 30 . "Mr Bush, clinging to his 'national interest' credo, seems incapable of seeing the big picture. He does not grasp the basic truth that America's national interest is inextricably intertwined with the global interest.... But most appalling of all is the message, taken alongside similarly short-sighted, self-centered actions in the fields of defence and diplomacy, that this Taliban-style act of wanton destruction sends around the world. Instead of leading the community of nations, Bush's America seems increasingly intent on confronting it."

Other European pundits point to "severe weather conditions around the planet — flooding for the second consecutive year in Mozambique, drought and famine in the Sudan — and say the U.S. is substantially to blame," claimed CBS News the evening of March 29. Almost all the media also regurgitated the old statistic that while the US only has about 4-6 percent (there seems to be unanimous disagreement over the exact number) of the world's population, it produces about 25 percent of the world's harmful greenhouse gas pollution. "This short-termism and this isolationism is profoundly flawed and misplaced," griped British Environment Minister Michael Meacher. The London Electronic Telegraph reported that Meacher also described global warming as "the most dangerous and fearful challenge to humanity over the next 100 years." He said that it was "almost unthinkable" that America should not be part of the agreement.

European Union (EU) environmental minister Margot Wallström issued a direct threat to punish the US. Wallström who confirmed the EU's commitment to ratify the protocol by 2002, said that climate change was not a marginal environmental issue that could be ignored, reported the March 29 Financial Times. "It has to do with trade and international relations...and we have to react as strongly and as quickly as possible," she said. Other EU officials jumped on the trade war bandwagon, warning that the "US position could affect trade relations with Brussels," said the Financial Times.

But is the threat to planet earth from global warming all that serious? Is it even real?

Can the Kyoto Protocol be justified?

To listen to the outrage from around the world, anyone would think that President Bush had just dropped a nuclear bomb on every capital in the world. Only one news outlet offered any balance whatsoever to the cacophony of cries that Bush should be tarred and feathered and run off the surface of planet earth. The March 30 London Electronic Telegraph opined, "The prophets of Armageddon should cool down. The world is not going to end as a result of Mr Bush's decision. Even if the Kyoto proposals were rigorously adhered to, they would not affect the globe's temperature by more than a fraction of one degree over the next 50 years — and that is according to the estimates of the agreement's most enthusiastic supporters." The Telegraph's statement is true. The impact of a fully implemented Kyoto Protocol is almost nonexistent.

In spite of the constant drumbeat of doom and gloom from the former Clinton administration, the UN and the popular press, there is simply no hard evidence that human-induced global warming is happening or a threat. In fact the UN and the globalists now seem to be entering the realm of the absurd, deliberately biasing research to "prove" global warming is a major threat to the world. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which met during January in Shanghai, China, issued their five year report stating that "the world's leading climatologists say global warming is happening faster than previously predicted." This, in spite of the fact that over 17,000 scientists confirmed as having degrees in the hard sciences in America have signed a petition saying, "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate." 

It is as though by shear volume of rhetoric and wild exaggerations the globalists can make global warming a reality. In seeming desperation, Robert Watson, head of the IPPC paints a very bleak picture of the future by predicting water shortages, disease, and agricultural damage. As reported by the January 23 Washington Post, Watson claimed that "Earth's average temperature could rise by as much as 10.4 degrees over the next 100 years" — the most rapid change in 10 millennia and more than 60 percent higher than the same group predicted less than six years ago.

Yet, Dr. John Christy, one of the world's leading climatology experts and head author of the IPCC summary report, strongly disagrees. In response to the media's clamor over the reports and Watson's wild assertions, Christy contended that "the world is in much better shape than this doomsday scenario paints. There were 245 different results in that report, and this was the worst-case scenario," he says. "It's the one that's not going to happen. It was the extreme case of all the different things that can make the world warm." (Italics added for emphasis) Christy is a professor of Atmospheric Science and is director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama. Likewise, Dr. Fred Singer of the Science and Environmental Policy claims there is little scientific substance to base it on and lists 12 reasons why these claims are groundless.

Likewise, MIT's Dr. Richard Lindzen describes the UN IPCC report as "absurd." In a recent interview with James Glassman, Dr. Lindzen said that the latest report of the UN-IPCC (that he helped author), "was very much a children's exercise of what might possibly happen" in a worse-case scenario prepared by a "peculiar group" with "no technical competence." Yet the press reports it as certainty. (Italics added for emphasis)

Lindzen is no climate slouch. New research by Lindzen, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, was reported in the March 8 issue of the prestigious Nature science magazine. Nature said that Lindzen and others show that "A natural heat-vent in the clouds over the Pacific ocean may enable the Earth to keep its cool despite a rise in the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere." The article, published in Volume 82 of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society , if true, would scuttle the global warming theory once and for all.

Even Dr. James Hansen, who leads the global warming research for NASA, admits that the science is unclear as to what is causing global warming. It was Hansen, who in 1988, proclaimed to the US Senate in testimony that there was proof that global warming was a threat to America and the world. In a series of papers in 2000 Hansen admitted that CO₂ may not be as important as once thought in causing global warming. 

Did Bush take correct action?

The known facts about global warming fly in the face of the extreme statements being made by the UN and political operatives in Europe and elsewhere. Global warming may or may not be happening (more likely the latter), but the economic devastation in the US by imposing the draconian Kyoto Protocol if implemented is guaranteed. At least the March 30 London Telegraph admitted this by reporting that the economic impact on the US by implementing the treaty would have been enormous and unacceptable. "For that reason, it was by no means certain that the Senate would have ratified the Kyoto pact, signed by President Clinton with a pious display of greenery in 1998. By abandoning Kyoto, Mr Bush is simply acknowledging these truths — and making a little domestic political capital into the bargain," noted the Telegraph.