Washington Post, June 29, 2001; page A36
David Ignatius’s commentary “Parallel Fears for the Planet Earth” [op-ed, June 17] buys into one of the Bush administration’s big lies: that Europeans are hypocrites because they have not yet ratified the Kyoto Protocol on global warming.
Here are the facts: When the United States, Europe, Japan and the rest of the world signed the Kyoto treaty in 1997, they knew that many of its key provisions for market-based flexibility, compliance and the like would need to be further elaborated before any industrialized country could ratify the accord. After all, until these critical rules were agreed upon, no country would know precisely what its treaty commitments would be.
So governments agreed to a plan of action under which they would negotiate these rules before they began ratification. The rule-making process was supposed to conclude at the climate summit in The Hague last November, but those talks were not successful, and governments (including ours) agreed to resume them next month in Germany. The nations of Europe are publicly committed to beginning their ratification processes for the treaty as soon as the framework for the implementing of rules is completed.
Everyone involved even peripherally in the climate talks knows this. That includes Colin Powell and all of the negotiators at the U.S. State Department. One would hope it includes the president.
Yet the Bush administration’s cry of “European hypocrisy” has worked like other big lies: Come up with a half-truth to deflect attention from the fact that you have no plausible policy whatsoever on the issue in question, then repeat the half-truth over and over in briefings, speeches and press releases until journalists and pundits begin parroting it as if it were common knowledge.
GLENN WISER
Washington