You’ve got to hand it to Tony Blair. When polls showed 80
percent of the British citizenry against America’s military
position, Blair stood fast with President Bush. And, as has
happened here, his overall popularity (and support for his Iraq
policy) has soared since hostilities began and the outrageous
nature of Saddam’s regime and tactics became common knowledge.
But selfless political sacrifice is as foreign as chastity in
Washington. After the dust settles, Blair wants Bush to drop his
steadfast opposition to the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
The Kyoto Protocol is wildly popular in Britain largely because
the country seems to lack scientists courageous enough to point out
that the government’s alarmist view of climate change is without
merit. That’s not the case here. And as everyone in the Bush
administration knows, warming in the next 100 years, given a very
small range of error, is likely to mirror what has happened in the
last 40 years. Further, the administration knows that the Kyoto
Protocol, while enormously expensive, would stop less than one
tenth of a degree (C) of warming in the next half-century, an
amount too small to be reliably measured.
Soon after Bush took office and National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice said “Kyoto is Dead,” the BBC reported that Blair
was under considerable pressure to oppose Bush. In April 2001,
Blair’s deputy prime minister, John Prescott, “want[ed] to end
cooperation [with the United States] on global trade, national
missile defence, and even British support for the U.S. stand
against China.” Others in Blair’s cabinet agreed, including
International Development Secretary Clare Short and Foreign
Secretary Robin Cook. When he came to Washington three months
later, Blair made plain his differences with Bush on the
Protocol.
Fast forward to the radically changed world after 9/11. Speaking
before the U.N.’s Earth Summit in Johannesburg in September 2002,
the London Guardian reported that “Tony Blair launched
into an unexpected broadside against George Bush on climate
change,” and added that “what makes it more surprising is that his
[Blair’s] aides appeared to be emphasizing the split with
Washington…. In what aides said was a direct message to the White
House, Mr. Blair said that Kyoto was not enough.” Going even
further than the Europe’s radical greens, Blair said, “Kyoto is not
radical enough.”
Blair shares more with the discredited Hans Blix than he does
with George Bush on global warming. Last month, Blix said, “I’m
more worried about global warming than I am of any major military
conflict.” On February 25, just three weeks before the start of
war, Environmental News Network reported that Blair “said world
leaders must not let the crisis in Iraq and the fight against
terrorism distract them from long term but equally important
environmental problems.”
Blair said, “The only answer is to construct a common agenda
that recognizes that both sets of issues have to be confronted for
the world’s security and prosperity to be guaranteed.” Further,
sounding more radical than Al Gore, he continued: “There will be no
genuine security if the planet is ravaged by climate change. We
will continue to make the case to the U.S. and to others that
climate change is a serious threat that we must address together as
an international community.”
It is doubtless that Blair has told Bush the price of military
alliance in Iraq: Drop U.S. opposition to Kyoto.
This won’t happen in a very public fashion. Instead, watch the
legislation. The current Senate energy bill contains three
provisions that come pretty close to enacting Kyoto. If the
administration lets them slide through, the deal has been done.
One creates a permanent Office of Climate Policy in the White
House, which gives radical environmentalists direct access to the
president. The legislation also requires a national strategy to cut
carbon dioxide emissions, which is a complete surrender by the
administration to the nonexistent science propping up a hypothesis
of dramatic and disastrous warming. Finally, the bill creates an
“early credit” for industries that cut emissions now. These
“credits” only have value if some type of legal limit on emissions
is imposed, so expect all these creditors to lobby for that limit.
That is precisely what Enron pleaded for from the Clinton
administration in a well-publicized letter from dethroned CEO Ken
Lay.
Bush I and Bush II are men of their word. In the first Gulf War,
Bush I promised the Saudis that we would not dethrone Saddam
Hussein as the price for use of their airbases. He kept it,
inadvertently creating today’s war. His son’s word is equally his
bond, which will become evident if the White House rolls over on
Kyoto in the next month.
