E. Ralph Hostetter
Friday, April 6, 2001

Our heartfelt thanks to a president who was smart enough to see through the smoke and mirrors of this global warming hoax and who had the courage to stick a pin in the big hot air balloon of engineered climate change – a balloon filled with nothing more than the over-inflated egos of a gang of pseudo-scientists.

At the core of the Kyoto Treaty was a draconian plan to turn all United States energy policies over to the United Nations. Control would include all our energy sources and resources. The Kyoto Treaty, upon ratification by the signatory nations, would become the Kyoto Protocol, much as the Montreal Protocol banned all use of chlorofluorocarbons (Freon) in the world. And ban it did. A change in the protocol, under United Nations rules, would require a majority vote. The United States would have one vote out of 180, with no veto power.

The purpose of the Kyoto Treaty was to penalize all the modern industrial nations – North America and Europe – for their "wasteful" energy use. These nations were identified as the largest emitters of carbon dioxide through the use of fossil fuels – coal, oil and gas. The Kyoto Treaty would require these nations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and thereby energy use (electricity, gasoline and fuel oil) to a point 5 percent below those of 1990 by the year 2012.

As an example, California is using 50 percent more energy than it used in 1990; by the year 2012 it would be using much more. To reduce California to less than half of the energy it consumed in 1990 would effectively shut California down much as the Sierra Club, one of the principle backers of the treaty, is doing now.

The Kyoto Treaty was the centerpiece of then Vice President Al Gore's effort to create a lasting legacy as the environmental giant he hoped to become. He referred to the Kyoto Treaty as his "Marshall Plan."

The treaty identified the industrial Western World as the culprit. Those nations used more energy than the so-called developing world. China, Russia, India, all of Africa and South America were exempt. The exempt nations were to be issued energy credits.

Energy in the industrial Western countries would have to be rationed immediately to reduce energy use to pre-1990 levels by the year 2012.

In the event the U.S. was starving energy-wise, it could purchase energy credits, for example, from China, or from Russia, to survive. The billions of dollars sent to these other countries, according to Gore, would be spent by them to clean up their own environments, and presto, the entire world would be pollution free.

"What evil lurks in the hearts of men?" Only the shadow of Clinton knows. The Kyoto Protocol would have been nothing more than a Marxist, communist, socialist plot to redistribute the Western industrial wealth to the old Communist-bloc nations.

The Kyoto Treaty was presented for approval by the United Nations to member countries of the world at The Hague in the Netherlands last November. Many Western industrial nations began to smell a rat and the meeting ended in disarray with a friendly "environmentalist" pushing a pie in the face of the American delegate.

The U.S. Senate in 1997 voted 97-0 to reject the Kyoto Treaty. In defiance of the U.S. Senate vote rejecting the treaty, both President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore signed it. Had Al Gore been elected president last November, word was that he intended to ram the treaty through regardless of the Senate disapproval.

The treaty has languished around Washington for too long. It lay there, like a deep cancer, waiting to spread. President George W. Bush's surgical removal of this malignant document is to be applauded.

Ralph Hostetter serves on the Board of Directors of the Free Congress Foundation.

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