Disgrace at The Hague.

• Position: Actions of United States delegation at global climate conference in The Hague

In late November, the United States earned international censure for its behavior during the global warming talks at The Hague in the Netherlands. It made such unreasonable demands that the negotiations broke up. As a result; the Kyoto Protocol, the 1992 agreement to cut greenhouse gases by 7 percent below 1990 levels, may be trashed.

Washington came to the talks loaded with proposals that would allow U.S. companies to continue polluting.

It insisted on receiving credits for forests and farmland and for paying developing countries to plant trees, arguing that trees absorb enough carbon dioxide to offset polluting industries. It also demanded emissions credit trading, whereby it could purchase, and store indefinitely, credits from those countries that pollute less, a plan that Ross Gelbspan, author of The Heat Is On: The Climate Crisis, The Cover-Up, The Prescription (Perseus Books, 1998), calls "dubious and inequitable."

"Refusing to cave under U.S. pressure, the Europeans insisted that the United States could meet no more than 50 percent of its obligation by these methods," writes Gelbspan in an op-ed column for the Progressive Media Project. "The result was a flameout of the talks."

The United States quickly lost credibility around the world.

"The actions of the United States delegation at the global climate conference in The Hague are a disgrace. The representatives of the most polluting nation on Earth have effectively thwarted modest measures which would have helped their own citizens as well as everyone else," said The Herald of Glasgow, Scotland, in a November 27 editorial headlined, "Staggering Selfishness: America Jealously Guards Her Right to Pollute."

"`You've sunk the world,' shouted furious protesters gathering outside the conference," reported Reuters News Service.

"`Build higher and wider dikes,' was Greenpeace's advice to the world's rich, heavily polluting countries, after the collapse," reported Canada's Southam News Service.

"The world will pay the price in tears," announced the Friends of the Earth.

"Nigeria's environment minister, Sani Zangon Daura, said the United States had caused a `plague of climate change' as harmful as the colonization of Africa," reported the Los Angeles Times. "A delegate representing low-lying island nations already being flooded because of global warming fumed, `We are fighting for our livelihood, and they, the U.S., are fighting about a change in lifestyle.'"

Some environmentalists, like Bill...