It's the thought that counts
The media and environmentalists like to bash the United States -- and President George W. Bush especially -- over the fact that we haven't signed onto the Kyoto Treaty. It turns out that all this fury is more about appearances than it actually is about damage done. From the American Thinker we have these inconvenient numbers:
The Kyoto treaty was agreed upon in late 1997 and countries started signing and ratifying it in 1998. A list of countries and their carbon dioxide emissions due to consumption of fossil fuels is available from the U.S. government. If we look at that data and compare 2004 (latest year for which data is available) to 1997 (last year before the Kyoto treaty was signed), we find the following.
- Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%.
- Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1%.
- Emissions from non-signers increased 10.0%.
- Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6%.
In fact, emissions from the U.S. grew slower than those of over 75% of the countries that signed Kyoto.
Follow the link for the rest of the numbers.
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The American Thinker results are merely driven by the fact that Hoven chose two random, unrepresentative and idiosyncratic years to compare the carbon dioxide emissions levels. What was going on in the years of 1997 and 2004 is not exactly representative of the pre and post Kyoto situations.
I used the SAME table he uses and compare the increase in emissions for a GROUP of years before 1997 and after 1997, and find very different results.
Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 11.65 percent while emissions from non-signers increased 12.01 percent.
http://unremarkablepolitics.blogspot.com/2007/12/kyoto-protocol-why-us-must-ratify.html