Obama Brings Bush 'Kyoto' Policy to Europe, Media Silent

The Washington Post had a story on Sunday titled, in its print edition, “Obama’s return to Europe in a changed world”. It chronicled how “the dominant themes of the president’s European tour, set to begin Monday, highlight how much the world has changed over that time. As he enters the second half of his term, security issues, in South Asia and the broader Middle East, have replaced the economy as the chief shared interests of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful allies.”

Er…what? The absence of a certain ‘greatest threat facing mankind’ is a bit of a red-flag for someone who has chronicled the establishment press having thrown in completely with (selective) political hysteria over the climate issue, and the havoc that ‘skeptics’ of the computer model projections and the policies have allegedly caused. And, incidentally, with no interest in the havoc the actual models have caused here in the real world through policies premised in them.

I scanned the full-page article for mention of Obama’s swift reversal of Bush’s alleged recklessness or, barring that, of the now surely worsened climate crisis and the stalled Kyoto process, that Obama didn’t, in fact, rush to ‘sign the Kyoto Protocol’ as Bush supposedly neglected per the media for eight years (Clinton signed it; Bush never unsigned it), comfortable I would find no such cheerleading, or keening.

That is of course because of the uncomfortable truth that political realities led Obama to continue the Bush policy of continuing the Clinton-Gore policy of not seeking ratification of Kyoto. And, further, he continued the Bush rejection of the Kyoto model, agreed to by Clinton-Gore to the great foreign policy and otherwise political detriment to the U.S. in ensuing years.

And, on cue, a story in a trade press outlet yesterday writes:

“But in a speech last month at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit in New York, [U.S. Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd] Stern said U.S. negotiators do not support that form of an agreement either. ‘In our considered view, this paradigm is flatly wrong as a matter of legal analysis,’ he said, referring to the so-called firewall paradigm that assigns developed and developing countries different roles regardless of their emissions.”

Whoa. Stop the presses! That was worth immediate, and sustained, rending of cloth and gnashing of teeth when uttered by Condoleezza Rice on March 17, 2001. Yet, not a word in WaPo’s coverage. Or any other coverage, so far as I can tell. As I repeated over and over as Obama’ s election became assured, then reality, the ‘climate crisis’ would be cured around noon on January 20, 2009. Once George W. Bush was gone, the greatest threat facing mankind would go the way of homelessness, as of about noon on January 20, 1993.

The issue is never the issue for our friends on the left. It’s a tool, a vehicle, an excuse.

While the alarmism’s political use has waned, the vehicle for ‘fundamentally transforming America’ remains agreed, if stalled by those same politics. Watch for it to change precisely one year from now, at the World Environment Summit gathering of world leaders and at which the U.S. will, again, have a slew of treaties thrown at us in the name of planetary salvation.

There’s even a particularly insidious ‘sustainability’ treaty, now being discussed as a ‘green jobs’ pact. Distilled, so far the talking points are that we consume too much –‘resource waste’ is their buzz-phrase — and it’s the rest of the world’s turn. If you’ve read Kyoto, you’ve read this one.

The event is cleverly timed amid our presidential election, with an eye toward taking advantage of our politics to rush the U.S. into agreeing to bad ideas, mostly ‘voluntary’ while setting up a years-long negotiating process. Why, what ever could these continued negotiations in an agreed pact be for? Well, just as after the Rio Summit in 1992 that this “Rio +20” confab celebrates, to turn those voluntary pacts into binding ones — binding on a handful of countries, that is — now that we’ve all sat down and dignified the problem and roadmap for a solution (hint: wealth transfers and limits on our own economic activity).

That’s how we got Kyoto, when George H. W. Bush fell for the ‘it’s just voluntary!’ spiel and agreed to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Despite Senate caution against doing any such thing, within three years we were finalizing the details of the binding Kyoto amendment to that which we hurried into in the name of a looming election and it don’t cost nuthin’. Yes, it does.

So expect the political fur to fly far less than it should, next Spring, even though this gathering and the global left-liberals’ scheming actually pose a threat to Obama’s campaign, one that Republicans should seize upon, in part to toss dirt on the grave of Kyoto which, as luck has it, expires at the end of 2012 and — so we’re told — simply must be replaced ASAP.

That’s because the Republicans are almost certain to nominate someone instinctively drawn to the ‘me too, just not as much as him’ shuffle (“Message: I care”), as manifested in the directly on-point records of Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, Tim Pawlenty and others.

So an inflection point on the energy rationing and global redistribution front is in the offing. And victory is a possibility, if opponents of this agenda can win the run-up. Which requires not losing it first during the Republican nominating process.