Subject: Viridian Note 00075:  Kyoto Politics

Key concepts:  inadequate government, Kyoto Protocol, US 
Senate

Attention Conservation Notice:  it's entirely and utterly 
political.  There are 1,300 words of it.

Links: Alliance to Save Energy
http://www.ase.org/
Senator Thad Cochran, Republican from Mississippi
http://www.senate.gov/~cochran/
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(includes full text of Kyoto Protocol):
http://www.unfccc.de
Republican Senators Resent Clinton's Temerity on Kyoto:
 http://www.senate.gov/~rpc/releases/1997/Gwupdate-mw.htm
Kirk Fordice, Governor of Mississippi, on Kyoto Protocol:
http://www.govoff.state.ms.us/pr051998.htm
Horrific EPA graph of growing climate temperature 
anomalies:
http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/news/j-dlo_pg.gif

Entries in the Viridian Couture Contest:
None. Greenhouse heat wave in effect, Viridians
reduced to shabby sombreros and gym shorts.
This contest expires July 21, 01999.


In Viridian Note 00074: "Browning the US Govt," we 
described how Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi tried to 
stop the President of the United States from mandating 
less CO2 use in the federal government.  On the face of 
it, the Senator's act seems incredibly stupid, vindictive 
and pointless, and was promptly denounced as 
"unbelievable."  

     While politics are of tangential interest to the 
Viridian movement, it's important to understand why the US 
government has become so dysfunctional in climate issues. 
Why have even simple, "no-brainer" reform efforts that 
actually *save taxpayers money* become areas of partisan 
confrontation?

      Why did Thad Cochran do this apparently ludicrous 
thing?  Let's speculate, shall we?  

     It would be too simple to denounce Senator Cochran as 
a corrupt puppet of the carbon-mining industries.  This 
kind of polarizing demogoguery is boring and 
counterproductive. It's been done to death. 

      Obviously the carbon industries are major players in 
the energy process. It could scarcely be otherwise.  For 
instance, the recent Interior Appropriations Bill (which 
Senator Cochran deliberately amended in order to frustrate 
the President), contains about 300 million dollars in 
Energy Department federal subsidies for oil and coal.   

       But the carbon industries don't own Thad Cochran.  
Mississippi isn't Kuwait.  He's never been an out-and-out 
oil man, unlike, for instance, George Bush.   There's some 
oil and a whole lot of foul, soft-lignite coal in 
Mississippi, with mining representing maybe 2 percent of 
the state's economy, but Senator Cochran's main 
legislative interest is catfish farming.  

    Maybe the guy is just incomprehensibly mean-spirited.  
Perhaps he hates Bill Clinton so much that, like many 
Republican zealots, he's willing to slash his own wrists 
to bleed on Clinton's shoes. But no.  Thad Cochran is a 
former Eagle Scout, a white-haired Baptist lawyer from 
Mississippi whose demeanour is commonly described as 
"courtly."  Cochran is the senior Senator from 
Mississippi, a career pol who wins his re-elections by 
large, cozy margins.  Cochran pre-dates the savage trench-
warfare epoch of his junior Senator, Trent Lott, and the 
politically extinguished Newt Gingrich.  The Senator has 
been in power a long time.  He is not childish, and he 
doesn't make trouble merely for trouble's sake.

      The Alliance to Save Energy artfully suggests that 
Senator Cochran is attempting to fleece the American 
taxpayer while stuffing fat back into the government.  If 
mere pork was the goal, Senator Cochran would be doing 
what he specializes in doing, i.e., rural Mississippi 
water projects.

        No, Thad Cochran has two basic reasons to do what 
he did.  Defending the Senate's privileges, and 
ideological pressure.

         First, the jealous Senate.  In introducing his 
amendment, the Senator irately declared that the 
President's action was a "thinly disguised effort to 
implement the Kyoto Agreement."   Why does he consider 
this a bad thing?  Because it makes the Senate into a 
potted plant, that's why.   The Senate believes it has 
already successfully dealt with Kyoto.  The Senate, in the 
bipartisan persons of Senators Byrd and Hagel, carried out 
a maneuver, back in 1997, called "putting the treaty in 
the parking lot."    

      The Senate didn't want a straight-up, 
confrontational vote on the Kyoto treaty, because this 
might cause political stress.  So, they simply stuck the 
treaty into permanent limbo, by passing the "Byrd-Hagel 
Resolution."  This resolution states, more or less, that 
the US Senate is not going to consider the Kyoto Protocol 
unless it's firmly established from the get-go that the 
United States comes out on top in the UN negotiations no 
matter what. 

      Byrd-Hagel is a silly resolution, but the text of 
the resolution isn't really important.   The resolution's 
formal text is just vapid  rhetorical dogfood for various 
economic and military American interest groups.   The 
point of the Byrd-Hagel resolution is to exploit the 
Senate's privilege to "advise and consent" on foreign 
treaties.   

     In practice, "advising and consenting" has become a 
procedural brake.  The Senate  can quietly pocket 
treaties, and do basically nothing, forever, while 
avoiding any serious political costs.  The legislative 
woods are full of vital yet uncertified international 
treaties stuck permanently in the US Senate, such as 
nuclear arms accords.  US Administrations and their State 
Departments, in despair, have come to act as if the 
treaties were in force anyway.

       It is demeaning for the Senate to have their bluff 
called in this way.  It's highly irritating to have Bill 
Clinton do what little he can to behave as if the Kyoto 
treaty were in force.  Therefore, Cochran threw a 
procedural spanner into the works, by shifting the ground 
to a different area, where the Senate controls the purse 
strings.

      Cochran's been made to look bad == after all, it's 
true that he is wasting money unnecessarily, and surprise 
amendments are always a cheap shot, and when you come 
right down to it, Senator Cochran is not a very bright man  
== but he can afford it, and he probably considers the 
humiliation worth it.  His point was to make Clinton pay a 
price for encroaching on the balance of powers.

     Then there's the second matter: rabid anti-Kyoto 
ideology.  I frankly doubt that Senator Cochran himself 
cares much about the substance of the Kyoto Accords one 
way or the other. He's never made a major issue of global 
warming, and the Senate has pretty well set it up so that 
he'll never have to take a public stand. But back home in 
Mississippi, the Republican Governor, Kirk Fordice, 
regards Kyoto as tantamount to foreign invasion and 
economic catastrophe. And the Governor has said so, 
loudly, and brought pressure on his state's Senators.

     As we have stated in previous Notes (see Note 00009) 
we Viridians aren't big fans of the Kyoto Protocol.  
Assuming the treaty is ratified (it won't be), even 
assuming it's efficiently enforced worldwide (it can't 
be), Kyoto is basically the industrial status quo of 1988, 
forever.  That is way, way too much carbon dioxide.  
Kyoto's proposed scheme appears better than exploding 
growth rates in carbon dioxide, but Kyoto's bogus solution 
is nowhere near enough to get the planet off the hook.  
Carbon use has to crash drastically, fast.  It has to 
wiped out by the same process that created it, industrial 
revolution.

    Kyoto is a bland assertion, by 173 separate national 
governments, that rickety confederations can control 
global industry.  Kyoto is all about ration-tickets, caste 
systems, and national-boundary bailiwicks.  The Kyoto 
Protocol looks like a document from a vanished epoch.  
Governments can't even control their own currencies any 
more, much less offshore maquilladoras and carbon moguls 
like Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein.  Even the well-organized 
and financed American government has blundered drastically.
America's  best smog-control efforts gave rise to ghastly mutants 
like the Sport Utility Vehicle.  

     Kyoto represents alien political control of the 
untrammeled pioneer spirit of Henry Ford, Thomas Edison 
and John D. Rockefeller, legendary American culture-heroes
who  are, without question, the three sinister godfathers of 
the Greenhouse Effect.  The implications of Kyoto are just 
too much for certain people to take, and Kyoto is 
especially too much for particularly unpleasant, paranoid 
people.  

       In further Notes, we will examine some of Kyoto's 
most virulent enemies.

O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O
I'M DIGGING COAL WITH MY RETURN KEY
O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O O=c=O