JawsBlog

Back when I was a sophmore, on of my good friends and suitemates was taking the introductory course on Global Economics.

He had to write a term paper for his course and the topic he decided to take on was the Kyoto treaty. Now, said friend identifies himself as a liberal. However, what he discovered while doing research for his paper was that the Kyoto Protocol would have been bad for the American economy.

He told us that the treaty/protocol was biased in favor of “developing” nations (which included China and India) in terms of greenhouse gas emissions–and that the caps mandated by the protocol would decrease American production and overall hurt the economy.

Now, what was so funny about all of this, was that another one of our suitemates (there were 8 of us total), was (and still is) an avid enviromentalist. She was almost apopleptic when she heard my friend going around talking about his finding (yes, he was instigating some of this for fun). So it was a constant source of entertainment for me.

This memory came right back to mind when I saw this headline over at the Drudge Report: Bush: Kyoto Treaty Would Have Hurt Economy

President Bush said in a Danish TV interview aired Thursday that adhering to the Kyoto treaty on climate change would have “wrecked” the U.S. economy.

“Kyoto would have wrecked our economy. I couldn’t in good faith have signed Kyoto,” Bush told the Danish Broadcasting Corp., noting that the treaty did not include other nations — including India and China — that he called “big polluters.”

I’m going to send my friend a copy of the article, as the President hit on the same things he did in his research paper. It’s also worth noting for the record, that the Senate had voted 97-0 against Kyoto’s ratification a few years earlier.

And where was I during all of this economic-enviromental debate? Cursing at my Organic Chemistry textbook (it was sophmore year after all)