Clinton Tries To Steal A March On Kyoto Treaty: Will The Senate Allow Implementation Without Ratification?

(Washington, D.C.): On 7 March 1998, the Washington Times reported: “The
Environmental
Protection Agency wants Congress to give it sweeping powers to start carrying out the
global-warming treaty even before the treaty has been ratified by the Senate.” While Senator
Jesse Helms, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has demanded that this
protocol signed at Kyoto, Japan late last year, be promptly submitted for the Senate’s advice and
consent,⁽¹⁾ the Clinton Administration clearly
intends to try to get away with
“implementation without ratification.” The mega-billion dollar question is: Will the
“World’s
greatest deliberative body” let Messrs. Clinton and Gore get away with this egregious end-run on
the Senate’s constitutional prerogatives?

The newspaper reports: “A draft EPA document obtained by The Washington
Times shows the
agency wants the authority to force power plants for the first time to cap their emissions of carbon
dioxide – the principal greenhouse gas covered by the treaty crafted in Kyoto, Japan, last
December. The powers would be added to an electricity-restructuring bill in
Congress.“
(Emphasis added.)

The Times also reported that, “One administration official called the
EPA’s move to couple
new powers to curb global warming with the restructuring bill ‘a crafty ploy,’ since the
legislation is popular among Republican deregulation advocates in Congress.”

What is at Stake

As the Casey Institute noted on 15 December 1997,⁽²⁾ there
are a number of compelling reasons why
Clinton-Gore must not be allowed to stonewall or otherwise circumvent the Senate.
These
include the following:

• The Theory of Global Warming Must Not Be Legitimated: By
  definition, Al Gore’s
  treaty endorses the proposition that the planet is warming. And yet, there is no scientific
  consensus for such a conclusion. If anything, the evidence from the most accurate
  measuring
  devices — earth-monitoring satellites and weather balloons — indicate that the earth has not
  warmed appreciably over the past forty years, despite increases in greenhouse gas emissions.

The public is being fed a steady diet of assertions to the effect that the planet is
warming catastrophically and that the scientific community agrees nearly unanimously
that the cause is human consumption of fossil fuels. Even though these contentions are
unproven, they are endlessly repeated in the well-honed technique of the “Big Lie.”
Were the treaty to go unchallenged, there is little chance that an informed debate will
occur in the future about whether the hardship and dislocation this treaty will require of
the United States is justified.

• The U.S. Must Not Abet the Spawning of a New Layer of International
  Bureaucracies:
  Everything else being equal, the Clinton Administration will be working over the next year with
  the other signatories to put into place new international bureaucracies intended to implement
  various controversial aspects of the Kyoto treaty. One of these will be responsible for
  dictating, monitoring and presumably enforcing the new energy control regime
  entailed in the
  GCCT. Another will be needed to perform a global SEC-type function with respect to the
  emissions trading scheme, which is expected to create out of whole cloth a multi-billion dollar
  commodity market.

The treaty also apparently calls for a new multilateral agency that will be responsible
for defining and orchestrating investment strategies concerning new greenhouse gas-reducing
technologies. According to a Washington Times report, the Kyoto accord
would also afford “UN bureaucrats some control over U.S. agriculture and forestry
policies.”

Decisions about who will be entrusted with all these powers — authority that
could, in the wrong hands, prove highly injurious to national wealth and standards
of living — will be made in the months before the Brazil conference.

• The U.S. Must Not Embrace a New ‘Industrial Policy’: The Clinton
  Administration has
  indicated its determination to apply classic big-government “industrial policy” techniques
  domestically in the name of reducing greenhouse gas emissions through technological
  advances. The billions of dollars earmarked for this purpose constitute a statist approach to
  picking “winners and losers” — one that is rarely (if ever) as efficient or effective as market
  forces.⁽³⁾ It also is rife with potential for abuse. Chances
  are that there will be even more
  politicization of the “science” of global warming as such funds wind up going primarily to
  those who subscribe to the party-line that the planet is heating up to a dangerous degree and that
  man is the cause.

While Congress will have some say over the expenditure of these funds, it will be far
easier to contest wasteful and politically motivated initiatives if the pretext for them,
namely the Global Warming treaty, has been rejected.

• The U.S. Must Reject a Dangerous Precedent for U.S. Sovereignty and Security:
  Last
  but hardly least, the GCCT sets a totally unacceptable precedent that must be repudiated at
  once. According to the Washington Times, in order to get agreement on Al Gore’s
  treaty, the
  U.S. delegation was obliged to abandon “its plan to exempt U.S. military training and overseas
  operations from fuel cutbacks that would be needed for the United States to reach its target.”
  The Times goes on to report that, “In the draft treaty, only overseas military actions
  approved
  by the United Nations would remain exempt as would training and combat in international
  waters.”

The Bottom Line

The Environmental Protection Agency’s bid for new powers to cap power plant emissions is
but
one instance of the Clinton-Gore agenda to begin imposing implementation of a seriously
defective agreement in the absence of the Senate’s advice and consent to the Kyoto Protocol.
The Senate should promptly take preemptive action by adopting a resolution — and, if necessary,
binding legislation — indicating that there will be no implementation of this accord unless and
until it is formally ratified.

– 30 –

1. See the Center for Security Policy’s Press Release entitled
Chairman Helms Sets the Right
Priorities on Pending Treaties: ABM Amendments, Kyoto Accord to Precede the Test
Ban, (No.
98-P 13, 22 January 1998).

2. See the Casey Institute’s Perspective entitled The
Senate Must Insist on an Early Vote on the
Kyoto Treaty (No. 97-C 193, 15 December 1997).

3. The ongoing financial meltdowns of economies throughout Asia
that have pursued such
industrial policies are vivid reminders of the folly of this approach.