Europe Girds for Battle Over Global Warming

By the end of the century, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently reported, melting ice caps could raise global sea levels by as much as 88 cm. But last week the Atlantic Ocean seemed to be just growing wider. After U.S. President George W. Bush bluntly rejected any American role in the gargantuan, decade-long effort to forge an international agreement to slow global warming, advocates of the Kyoto Protocol in Europe reacted with howls of protest and betrayal.

The reaction revealed a trait Europeans have long considered a quintessentially American attribute: political naïveté. It seems pretty obvious now that a Texas oilman with a proven aversion to antipollution regulation and a firm grounding in the don't-tread-on-me ideology of Western Republicans would reject a complicated agreement like the one forged in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997. A few weeks ago, Bush clearly indicated his opposition to the central tenet of that agreement — curbing global warming by cutting emissions of carbon dioxide — in a letter to several Republican senators. In it, he abandoned a campaign pledge to regulate CO2 emissions from American power plants, citing among other factors the "incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change." Full Story...