Next Wednesday, in the enormous glass-paneled European Union Parliament building in Brussels, hundreds of men and women will gather to mark the start of a new era. A similar celebration will be held in Toronto, another in Casablanca and others in Tokyo, New Delhi, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Auckland and Mexico City, among other places.
In each of these cities, people will be celebrating an unprecedented international treaty that's going into effect that day. It is the product of eight years of work and it has brought 141 countries together. It represents exactly the kind of broad global undertaking that idealists all over the world have been striving for since the end of World War II: a massive, worldwide plan to address a terribly pressing problem confronting the entire planet.
The treaty is the Kyoto Protocol, a collective response to the greatest security crisis in the world -- global warming.
But one country will not be celebrating. The United States. Even though almost all European countries are on board, and even though Russia is on board and even though China is on board, the United States, in an act of supreme irresponsibility, is standing on the platform watching the train leave the station. (The only other industrialized nations that have failed to join the protocol are Monaco and Australia.)
This is particularly egregious when you consider that the United States would be by far the most significant participant. That's because it is the single biggest polluter on the planet, accounting for about one-quarter of the world's greenhouse gases.
Why won't the United States take part? Because the Bush administration refuses to believe in science and refuses to ask for responsible leadership from its giant corporate backers. Instead, genuflecting to the coal, oil and automobile lobbies, our country continues to act like a superpower bully that does what it wants, when it wants and how it wants -- deadly consequences be damned.
The rules that apply to the rest of the world, the administration in effect is saying, need not apply to us. International agreements -- whether they involve the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol or the Geneva Convention -- should not be allowed to bind the hands of the most powerful nation on Earth. On that point, at least, the U.S. is are consistent.
