President Bill Clinton and scores of other world leaders met last week at United Nations headquarters in New York City to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the 1992 environmental be-in known as the Rio Earth Summit. The heads of state were supposed to decide what further steps should be taken to halt the decline of Earth's life-support systems. In fact, this meeting had much the flavor of the original Earth Summit. To wit: empty promises, hollow rhetoric, hypocritical posturing, bickering between rich and poor, and irrelevant initiatives. Think Congress in slow motion.
Almost obscured by this torpor is the fact that...