HEINZ-SIGHT NOT 20/20

Christopher Horner

Candidate’s Wife Confuses Calendar in Attacks

At a February dinner in Brussels designed to foster dialogue over the tentative transatlantic relationship, European Commission officials and parliamentarians floridly espoused “blame it on Kyoto” once too often. On the principle that relationships like markets perform more perfectly with information, I uttered an unpleasant fact (of which all were doubtless aware to some degree): This is merely an excuse, and not a very good one, for their own behavior.

The nods and shoe-staring indicated acceptance. Regardless, this nonsense is warmly and increasingly embraced by the Kerry campaign.

What prompted the euphemisms of “withdrawal”, “rejection” or other dissing of the global warming treaty was Vice-President Cheney first telling MSNBC, “We do not support the approach of the Kyoto treaty.” This occurred on 17th March 2001, and was repeated that same day by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to European diplomats behind closed doors. This policy position, ritually cited as a key if not determinative factor in President Bush “squandering” what is typically characterized as “unprecedented international goodwill, post-September 11th ”, was announced six months before the U.S. was attacked.

Regardless, a Google search of “post-9/11 goodwill Kyoto” yields 367 entries. And counting.

Last Monday, Teresa Heinz continued her audition for America’s First Lady and roving ambassador at a Mill Valley, CA fundraiser for her husband. There, she repeated and further mangled the myth, bemoaning President Bush’s refusal to sign the treaty, signed under President Clinton in November 1998.

Sloppy journalism and political rhetoric notwithstanding, no honest debate exists whether the U.S. “withdrew” – either from the treaty itself, as was done by renouncing the International Criminal Court signature – or from the “Kyoto process” – as the robust and publicly available rosters of U.S. delegations to all talks readily attest.

What galls the more articulate Left is President Bush having affirmed the Clinton-Gore position on Kyoto. President Clinton left office having for over three years refused to send the treaty, first agreed in December 1997, to the Senate for a ratification vote. This likely had something to do with that body’s anticipatory if non-binding 95-0 vote against such a document. It also had something to do with the merits, as even Clinton’s Energy Information Administration estimated the costs of Kyoto to the U.S. alone at upwards of 4% of GDP, or $400 billion annually for no detectable climatic impact.

As Ms. Heinz-Kerry doubtless knows, it was Europe’s ploy to take advantage of a desperate U.S. delegation during negotiations coinciding with the Florida recount which prompted the U.S. Executive (Clinton) to walk away from Kyoto in its current form. That delegation included Senator John Kerry, present at the talks with his wife and highly visible in the closing hours scrambling to salvage negotiations from such perfidy.

Contemporaneous media coverage rightly blamed Europe for its gamesmanship, the BBC specifically pinning responsibility on the French (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/1041756.stm). When the occupant of the White House changed, however, so did the tune.

Heinz-Kerry’s recitation will doubtless not be the last Kerry campaign employment of the new mantra. Her husband delivered two of his first major policy speeches, on foreign relations at Georgetown’s Walsh School of Foreign Service (http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/speeches/spc_2003_0123.html) and on the environment at Harvard’s Kennedy School (http://www.gwu.edu/~action/2004/issues/kerr020903spenv.html), premised in large part on President Bush’s mythical withdrawal from Kyoto reaping consequences for Middle East diplomacy.

Presidents will forever confront Europeans rationalizing their feelings toward the U.S. on such whims. The truth remains that for whatever his reasons President Clinton determined to not truly commit the U.S., on the (commonly propagated if false) notion that treaty signatures are mere feel-good gestures. Meanwhile, green groups and the EU continue plotting their litigation strategy to enforce the U.S.’s Kyoto signature, through vehicles ranging from the 1789 Alien Tort Statute to the World Trade Organization’s dispute resolution body.

While such threats remain less viable so long as Russia continues to refuse ratification and thereby keep Kyoto from going into effect, President Bush should, indeed, withdraw from Kyoto. Regardless of Kerry campaign claims, however, it remains that he is merely custodian of the Clinton position.

Mindless rhetoric ignoring real signatures or fictional withdrawal advances the debate not one inch. The man who would be our nation’s foreign policy leader should more honestly campaign on such topics. His spouse, as ever anxious to tout her internationalist bona fides as she is to claim the Bush Administration has misled Americans and allies alike, should also demonstrate she can get her own facts straight.

Christopher C. Horner is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC.

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Christopher C. Horner serves as Counsel to the Cooler Heads Coalition and a Senior Fellow at CEI. In the former capacity, he oversees petitions and litigation on topics including the National Assessment on Climate Change, Freedom of Information Act, data access and quality laws, plus other projects, agency statutory compliance, and other legal matters involving environment and energy issues, international environmental treaties, and climate policy.

chorner@cei.org