Nobody should be too surprised that President George W. Bush has reneged on the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change. After all, his campaign for the White House was substantially financed by fossil fuel interests which have most to lose from its ratification and he is their loyal mouthpiece.
Boss Croker, of Tammany Hall fame, once defined an honest man as one who "when bought, stays bought". That is certainly true of this puppet President who sold himself very early on to the oil lobby, the coal lobby, the car lobby, the gun lobby, the missile lobby, the logging lobby, the pro-life lobby and the pro-death lobby.
Just five weeks before last November's presidential election, Bush had promised he would require US power plants to cut their emissions, including carbon dioxide - the main greenhouse gas - to tackle what his opponent, Al Gore, had described in 1992 as "the greatest environmental threat facing humanity".
Instead, Bush executed a shameless U-turn. Earlier this month, in a letter to four climate-change sceptics in the US Senate, he made it clear he did not now believe mandatory reductions in CO 2 emissions should be imposed on power plants, especially with California teetering on the edge of electricity blackouts. The President went further, declaring that he was reluctant to curb such emissions "given the incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change". In this, he was faithfully repeating a tired old line trotted out by the Global Climate Coalition, which opposes the Kyoto process.
The GCC, a consortium of largely US-based multinationals, will no doubt be delighted to welcome such a powerful recruit to its cause. Because the truth is it had been running out of steam as more and more corporations, led by the insurance industry, came to accept that climate change was a very real threat.
Like their counterparts in Europe, US corporations began to see that the Kyoto process represented a business opportunity to get involved in promoting cleaner technologies, such as hydrogen-fuelled cars, solar power and wind energy. In that context, Bush's knee-jerk reactionary decision to ditch Kyoto is a victory for the old guard. It has also come at a curious time, just weeks after the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), made up of 2,000-plus scientists from around the world, had issued its latest assessment of the scientific evidence and warned that global temperatures were rising even faster than predicted in earlier reports.
The IPCC said there was no longer any doubt that this was due to human-induced changes in the climate system; in particular, the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And it forecast much more frequent "extreme weather events", with predictably dire consequences.
The Bush letter also followed a meeting of G8 environment ministers in Trieste, attended by a representative of his administration, which expressed concern about "the seriousness of the situation".
Bush has now decided that even the minimal steps required by the Kyoto Protocol are too much for his country to stomach. And so it will not do anything to curb its greenhouse-gas emissions, which amount to a quarter of the global total, until developing countries such as China also agree to take action.
This cuts Kyoto to the quick. For it was a fundamental principle of the protocol agreed in December 1997 that the rich industrialised countries, which caused the problem in the first place, must take the lead in addressing it. And even George W. Bush must know that there is no way China, or India for that matter, will let them off the hook.
The EU is dismayed by Bush's decision to renege on Kyoto, but it is unlikely to be deflected from its commitment to ratify the protocol so that it can take effect next year.
Even the Japanese and the Canadians have expressed regret about Washington's Uturn. However lukewarm, Japan's support for the protocol negotiated in its old imperial capital is critical if it is to secure the 55 per cent of industrialised countries necessary for ratification.
If the resumed summit in July does manage to cut a deal that preserves the integrity of the protocol, as the EU has demanded, the US will find itself isolated and under tremendous moral and political pressure to fall into line. Otherwise, George W. Bush will increasingly be seen as a modern Nero who plays the fiddle while the planet burns.
Taken together with other anti-environmental moves, such as the proposal to open up Alaska's wilderness to oil exploration, it may even provoke such a backlash at home that Bush may find - as the Minister for the Environment, Noel Dempsey, suggested this week - there are "more environmentalists than oilmen", even in Texas.
