In March 2001 Bush broke his campaign promise to regulate carbon emissions and
withdrew the United States from the Kyoto treaty, which seeks to slow global
warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Gore signed the treaty in 1997, but it never was ratified by the Republican-controlled Senate. Bush said it also should have included developing countries such as China and India, which are major polluters.
Achieving the treaty's target will be difficult without participation by the United States, which accounted for 36 percent of the industrialized nations' carbon dioxide emissions in 1990. Russia accounted for 17 percent.
Critics say Bush's opposition is ironic because the treaty was modeled after the market-based U.S. program for cutting acid rain created in 1990 by Bush's father and often pointed to by the current administration as a success story.
"Indeed, it would be very, very surprising if this instrument were not used by the people who invented it," Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the Kenya-based U.N. Environment Program, said in an interview.
Annie Petsonk, a lawyer for New York-based Environmental Defense, a nonprofit group that says it is dedicated to protecting the environment, said the United States will be left isolated on the biggest environmental challenge of the century. She said the White House estimates of Kyoto's costs do not appear to include the cost savings from trading pollution rights.
"For business, it's quite serious because it means that the global carbon market is going to move, and U.S. companies are going to be left out of that market," Petsonk said. She helped
shape the Kyoto treaty and the first President Bush's climate policy as a Justice Department lawyer.
By signing on to the treaty, industrialized nations commit themselves to cutting their collective emissions of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases to 5.2 percent below 1990 levels.
