ENCOURAGING?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- U.S. greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming fell by 1.2 percent last year, the largest decrease in a decade, due in part to slow economic growth and a milder winter, the government said.

Last year's decline was in sharp contrast to the average 1.3 percent annual growth rate in U.S. emissions from 1990 to 2000 and was twice the level of the only other drop since 1990 -- a 0.6 percent decline in 1991 -- according to a report from the Energy Information Administration. (Full story)

This is a reasonably good sign, but why has this decrease occurred? According to the Energy Information Administration, reasons include:

-decreased economic growth
-drop in manufacturing
-warmer weather
-decreased demand for coal power

The article continues:

President George W. Bush withdrew the United States last year from the international Kyoto treaty that seeks to reduce greenhouse gas emissions among industrialized countries, fearing that the treaty's requirements would hurt the U.S. economy.

(...)

Instead, the Bush administration said it wants to conduct years of further research on the causes of global warming and in the meantime will promote voluntary efforts among U.S. industries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

The European Union and Japan, which have adopted the Kyoto treaty, have criticized the Bush administration for not doing more to cut U.S. emissions. The United States is the world's biggest energy consumer and also its largest emissions producer.

You can go ahead and argue the merits and usefulness of the Kyoto treaty all you want (my opinion is that despite whatever imperfections its critics claim it has, the US should have ratified it, if only for the purpose of being a cooperative and positive member of the world community). But from the EIA findings we come upon some irony. They cite the sluggish economy as a factor in decreased emissions. Yet what has Bush claimed the Kyoto treaty would do? Hurt the economy! So it looks like either way, we get decreased emissions and a faltering economy.

Thus, we would have had, arbitrarily, the same result if we had ratified Kyoto. The only difference is that people around the world might have liked us more if we did. And that's important.