Kyoto

Prince Charles talked Zen with Buddhist monks, and Princess Diana slipped on a peach kimono given to her by the mayor of Kyoto yesterday as the royal couple got into a Japanese state of mind in their first full day in the East. "Should I put it on?" Diana asked Charles when she was presented with the kimono at a garden party on the grounds of a 17th-century shogun's castle. As Charles smiled, she did, to the "oohs" and "ahs" of onlookers, and then took a few dainty steps. The garment, with floral decorations, was made especially for the princess and took six months to fashion.

Is Russia in, out, or just thinking about the Kyoto agreement on climate control? Thing is, it doesn't matter much. That's because we're out. The U.S. Congress, led by stiff opposition by business, slapped Kyoto forcefully down in 1998. And no global agreement is very global without us. So the question is: Since we don't have Kyoto, what can we have? What would a good climate-control treaty for the future look like? Here are a few broad things such a treaty ought to have: Flex.

Few issues have generated more submissions to this page lately than the Kyoto conference. Below are some selections. Just who are the 2,600 scientists proclaiming the certitude of human-caused global warming? Nine out of 10 are unqualified to render expert opinions, according to a Citizens for a Sound Economy study. Among the so-called experts: a plastic surgeon, landscape architects, lawyers, dermatologists, English and linguistics experts, a hotel administrator, a gynecologist, sociologists - even an expert in traditional Chinese medicine!

If there were a contest for the most overblown news event of 1997, the global warming summit in Kyoto ought to win hands down. The editors of my hometown paper, the Bangor Daily News, were charitable in labeling it merely "hot air. " Meanwhile, we've been distracted from the real issue: the economic gains that sensible greenhouse reduction strategies would bring. Kyoto seems hollow indeed when we consider the quieter but more significant politics of transit policy. While U.S. delegates to the global summit trumpeted this nation's newfound commitment to the environment, Congress struggled to approve a paltry two-year $2.3 billion-dollar subsidy for Amtrak.

The Kyoto global climate treaty is a big surprise in many ways. Surprise No. 1: A treaty happened. Surprise No. 2: The United States, the roped-down Gulliver of the negotiations, led the way, sort of. Despite a foggy keynote address, Vice President Gore sent the right message: Loosen up. And people did. Surprise No. 3: This thing has guts. The United States agrees to cut emissions of greenhouse gases to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The European Union had wanted 15 percent.

A seven-man Japanese delegation headed by the vice mayor of Kyoto completed a whirlwind tour of Philadelphia-area plants yesterday in what both the visitors and their hosts hope might start a new high-tech partnership between the two cities. Accompanied by their own interpreter, the trade group came here seeking to attract investment in Kyoto, Japan's oldest city. Like Philadelphia, Kyoto (population 1.7 million) is rich in history and culture but has fallen behind in economic development.

ENIAC, the world's first computer developed at the University of Pennsylvania, is headed for Japan as part of Philadelphia's contribution to the World Exposition of Historical Cities. The exposition will be held in Kyoto from Nov. 8 to 29 to commemorate that city's installation as the capital of Japan 1,200 years ago. Officially, the exhibit is only open to cities that are more than 1,000 years old and have a population exceeding 500,000 people. While Philadelphia obviously does not fit both of those criteria, the city was invited to attend because numerous area businesses have been active in Kyoto, according to Lee T. Stull, managing director of the Greater Philadelphia International Network.

"Doesn't it make sense to keep our options open so we can implement [Kyoto's] terms without harming, disrupting or complicating our lives?" opined former U.S. Sen. Malcolm Wallop, a virulent opponent of the Kyoto protocol. Nothing's that easy, buddy. Sure, it was more convenient to dump raw sewage into rivers, throw away aluminum soda cans, and use aerosol hairspray, but Americans have adjusted just fine to sewage plants, recycling and pump spray-bottles. And our environment is better for it. Similarly, Americans can painlessly step up to slow global warming.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Kyoto involves 1,500 delegates from 150 nations, a cloud of greenhouse gases and some of the most complex international negotiations ever attempted. Clearly, the nations of the world need to do something. The oft-heard claim that "global warming is bad science" is bunk. The massive preponderance of scientific wisdom tells us the atmosphere has warmed and greenhouse gases are involved. But science can't tell us yet what it all means.

Most tourists traveling to a foreign country are looking for a guidebook vacation. That was my intent as I planned a recent family trip to Kyoto and Tokyo to visit our son. He has been living on the northern island of Hokkaido since July. I imagined visiting the serene shrines of Kyoto, the tall towers of Tokyo, and viewing the scenery from the high speed bullet trains. While I did enjoy these experiences in Japan, the memories that will remain with me are the details I discovered along the way. Take umbrellas, for example.

Most tourists traveling to a foreign country are looking for a guidebook vacation. That was my intent as I planned a recent family trip to Kyoto and Tokyo to visit our son. He has been living on the northern island of Hokkaido since July. I imagined visiting the serene shrines of Kyoto, the tall towers of Tokyo, and viewing the scenery from the high speed bullet trains. While I did enjoy these experiences in Japan, the memories that will remain with me are the details I discovered along the way. Take umbrellas, for example.

As a veteran European traveler, Charlie Dagit has toured every kind of sacred space there is in that part of the world. But in 1992, when he visited the gardens of Kyoto and other Japanese cities, he experienced something deeper than anything he'd ever felt in a cathedral or mosque. "There was a spirit of sacredness and serenity and oneness with nature," he says. Adds Alice Dagit, who accompanied her architect husband on that inspiring trip, "It captured your heart and soul.

Seeking shelter from a driving rain, a priest and a peasant huddle under Kyoto's dilapidated Rashomon Gate. They shake their heads in bewilderment at a mystery that cannot easily be solved in 11th century Japan, where feudal wars have left Kyoto - and the truth - in ruins. A woodcutter, who claims to have witnessed a rape and a murder in the woods, joins the pair to talk about what occurred. So begins Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon , the essential 1951 film that considers the ravishment of a noblewoman by a cunning bandit and the subsequent death of her husband, a proud samurai, in flashback, from four contradictory perspectives.

Peter and Rosemary Grant, the celebrated Princeton University biologists who have spent decades expanding on Charles Darwin's work in the Gal?pagos Islands, have won a lucrative scientific award called the Kyoto Prize. The honor, worth about $500,000, is to be announced today by the Inamori Foundation, a 25-year-old philanthropic organization founded by Japanese businessman Kazuo Inamori. As of yesterday, not even the Grants knew they had won, according to a university official who was sworn to secrecy.

And then there was one. With new Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's announcement yesterday that his country will ratify the Kyoto agreement, the United States became the only major industrialized nation that refuses to sign the protocol limiting greenhouse gas emissions. The Bush administration has insisted that the Kyoto accords, which went into effect in 2005, would unreasonably limit this nation's ability to address climate change in ways that recognize its specific environmental and economic concerns.

Climate change is by nature a global problem. So when a Pennsylvania State University graduate student presented Montgomery County officials with a 145-page report on what it could do to reduce greenhouse gases - the culprits in global warming - Commissioner Thomas Jay Ellis was skeptical. Could one county - even one with more people than some states - make a difference in such a huge problem? Ellis and his fellow commissioners decided this month that it could at least try. Montgomery County, which emits more greenhouse gases than more than half the world's nations do individually, thereby joined a burgeoning list of cities, counties and states that have stopped waiting for federal direction on global-warming remediation.

ON WEDNESDAY, in the enormous glass-paneled European Union Parliament building in Brussels, hundreds of men and women gathered to mark the start of a new era. A similar celebration was held in Toronto, in Casablanca and in Tokyo, New Delhi, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Auckland and Mexico City, among other places. In each of these cities, people celebrated an unprecedented international treaty that went into effect on that day. It is the product of eight years of work and brought 141 countries together.

The Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which came into force this week, represents a massive act of folly by many of the world's industrialized nations. It sets the world on a course to economic disaster while doing nothing to alleviate global warming. It is the wrong solution to the wrong problem at the wrong time. Kyoto attempts to alleviate what may be a major cause of warming - the emission of greenhouse gases - by suppressing energy use in the developed world. Yet energy use is vital to modern health and wealth.

This week brought yet another sterling occasion for America-bashers around the world to pummel the United States. When the Kyoto Protocol - now the Kyoto Treaty - at long last went into effect on Wednesday, it received little attention in this country but massive media coverage in much of the world. Kyoto, the first major international agreement to fight global warming, started as an emblem of humanity's urgent need to protect the environment. Not long after George W. Bush took office, however, Kyoto took on a new meaning: as the symbol of America the Selfish.

In the United States, global warming is mocked in novels, movies and even on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Elsewhere, it's taken seriously, as it should be. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has made climate change a priority of his coming leadership of the Group of 8 industrial nations and the European Union. Here's what he said in September: "What is now plain is that the emission of greenhouse gases, associated with industrialization and strong economic growth from a world population that has increased sixfold in 200 years, is causing global warming at a rate that began as significant and has become alarming . . . a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power that it alters radically human existence.