Kyoto

The Towers of Windsor Park, Cherry Hill Retiring from the advertising business in New York, Louise Hallat moved to Cherry Hill because one of her three children lived there. "After looking at everything else Cherry Hill had to offer, I thought this was the best of all other apartment buildings," she said of the Towers of Windsor Park. That was 20 years ago. And today? "I still say it's the best place to live in Cherry Hill," Hallat, 77, states unconditionally. "It's spacious," she said.

Torao Kanamura held the cellophane-wrapped maguro to within inches of his face and inspected it absorbedly, the tuna sashimi glowing like a claret in firelight. "It is the color that you seek first," he said. "Then it is the grain of the flesh. " The Manhattan marketing executive was planning a dinner party that evening for "some business associates. " Nothing lavish. Just some soup, assorted sashimi and beef sukiyaki. "But is very important," he said. "Correct ingredients are essential.

Many Americans would have been startled to see the way Europe's press covered last month's statement from the Bush administration about the Kyoto agreement on global warming. When Christie Whitman, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said that the agreement was "effectively dead", they might have supposed she was stating the obvious, given his opposition to the treaty throughout his election campaign. . .Yet the remark. . .was greeted abroad with astonishment and outrage.. . .America had two good reasons to reject the Kyoto accord as it stands.

Europeans have been quick to castigate President Bush for rejecting [the Kyoto protocols, which] would hurt his country (and ultimately the world) . . . easy for European leaders to . . . condemn America for failing to support something they know won't take effect. It's easy, just as it would have been easy for President Bush to voice support for the treaty, knowing even the now-Democratic Senate would never ratify it. But it wouldn't have been right. And they know it. Charli Coon, energy policy analyst, Heritage Foundation

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.

My, how things can change! In 1997, the Senate voted 95-to-0 for the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, which stated that it is "the sense of the Senate that" the United States should not be a signatory to the Kyoto Protocols. That means 95 senators voted against the treaty and zero voted for it. That's not just bipartisan, that's unanimous! Now, since President Bush took office earlier this year, he has been constantly attacked and excoriated by radical greens as anti-environment. Recently, the President's detractors have attacked his position on the Kyoto Protocols - which happens to be very close to the 95-to-0 position of the U.S. Senate.

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.

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.

The scenario is becoming all too familiar. The nations of the world gather in an effort to find a way to soften the impacts of global climate change - and spend the time criticizing the United States. So it was this week at the Hague, Netherlands, where 180 nations are negotiating the implementation of the three-year-old Kyoto Protocol. The protocol calls for a rollback in emissions of the "greenhouses gases" that appear to be raising global temperatures and changing climate.

The first week of the international conference called to work out a new treaty on greenhouse gases and climate change was a bit like the Beckett play Waiting for Godot - a lot of talk and not much action. Diplomats from 150 nations and about 10,000 hangers-on (environmentalists, business lobbyists and journalists) stuffed the conference center in Kyoto, Japan, for five days of technically arcane, politically intense, and not particularly productive talks. The hope, however, is that as the top negotiators and ministers from around the world arrive this weekend, the real bargaining and deal making will begin.