Page added on July 31, 2006
The U.S. chose economic growth over reducing emissions – but so have many of the countries who actually signed on to the Kyoto treaty.
NEW YORK (Fortune) — The green fundamentalists have never been shy about casting the first stone.
If the world fries because of climate change, they thunder, it will be America’s fault. Or, more specifically, George W.’s, because he took the Kyoto Protocol out of the desk drawer where Bill Clinton had stashed it for several years, and definitively binned it.
Indeed, the United States and Australia are the only rich industrial countries that have not signed on to Kyoto, the international treaty designed to slow down the rate of greenhouse gas emissions. (President Bush said that meeting the target of reducing U.S. emissions by 7 percent from 1990 levels would be too much of an economic burden.)
This willful resistance of world opinion, say the Bush administration’s many environmental critics, is the classic example of how America is setting itself apart from mainstream thinking.
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