Just what we need this summer from dems, more hot air...
WHEN SEN. JOHN Edwards addressed The Chronicle editorial board in February before the Democratic primaries, I asked him if he would ask the Senate to ratify the Kyoto global warming treaty. "Yes," the presidential candidate answered. Then, he added, he believed Sen. John Kerry shared his position. Wrong.
The next day, when presidential candidate Kerry talked to The Chronicle editorial board, he said that he would not ask the Senate to ratify Kyoto.
Now the Democratic Party has dropped support for Kyoto (a plank in the 2000 party platform) from the initial draft of the national platform for 2004. John Kerry, you see, is no Al Gore, who negotiated the treaty for Bill Clinton in 1997.
Still, it's easy to understand how Edwards, now Kerry's running mate for the White House, was confused.
Teresa Heinz Kerry demonstrates her husband's green credentials by boasting that he has attended more Kyoto conferences than any other major politician in America.
Many news stories in 1997 referred to Kerry's support of Kyoto, undeterred by the Massachusetts senator's vote with 94 other senators for a resolution that directed President Clinton to not agree to a global warming pact that exempted developing nations. (Veep Al Gore ignored the Senate and agreed to a pact that exempts China, India and other developing nations from any pollution caps, while requiring the United States to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.)
At the February ed board meeting, Kerry said, "I believe there is a formula to bring the less-developed countries into this solution. And that's what you have to do. You can't have the United States of America and the developed world reducing emissions, while China and Mexico, South Korea and other countries, India just going crazy spewing about."
Kerry pledged to "immediately go back to the table, and immediately indicate America's willingness to be responsible to engage in a legitimate dialogue about how we're going to do this."
While Europeans generally see President Clinton as supporting Kyoto -- after all, his administration signed the pact -- Clinton never sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification, hence it was never official U.S. policy.
More important, when Clinton left office in 2001, emissions were 14 percent higher than 1990 levels. Clearly Clinton was never serious about meeting the Kyoto goals. Clinton, no fool, knew how compliance with Kyoto would damage the U.S. economy.
Emissions have fallen during the Bush years to 11.5 percent higher than 1990 levels. Still, some environmentalists privately agree that it is not practical to expect the United States to meet the Kyoto goals -- although they believe Washington could do more to curb greenhouse-gas emissions.
Kerry has been highly critical of Dubya's unapologetic rejection of Kyoto, which so incensed Our Betters in Europe.
In retrospect, I have to agree. President Bush could have just given the pact lip service -- as Clinton did -- and Europe would have been mollified. Or Bush could have sent the pact to the Senate, and watched both Democrats and Republicans reject it and take the heat of the (all-bow) international community. By being blunt, Bush unnecessarily alienated allies.
That said, it would be interesting to see how Europe would react if a President Kerry rejected Kyoto. Kerry says that, unlike Bush, he would rush to the bargaining table to work out a new treaty. But after years of demanding compliance with Kyoto itself, would that be enough to appease France, Germany and the United Kingdom?
Maybe it would.
Maybe it is because Kyoto is more about hot air -- bashing America's big cars and affluence -- than it is about greenhouse gases. Maybe, if a top U.S. pol says nice things about Kyoto, that's enough. So if Kerry could fool John Edwards about his support for Kyoto, maybe he can fool the rarified minds of Europe, too.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/07/15/EDGT07LEVS1.DTL
Ahhhh,,, some good news....
Extra! Extra! The big news of the past decade in America has been largely overlooked, and you'll find it shocking. Young people have become aggressively normal.
Violence, drug use and teen sex have declined. Kids are becoming more conservative politically and socially. They want to get married and have large families. And, get this, they adore their parents.
The Mood of American Youth Survey found that more than 80 percent of teenagers report no family problems -- up from about 40 percent a quarter-century ago. In another poll, two-thirds of daughters said they would "give Mom an 'A.'
"In the history of polling, we've never seen tweens and teens get along with their parents this well," says William Strauss, referring to kids born since 1982. Strauss is author, with Neil Howe, of "Millenials Rising: The Next Great Generation."
In an article in the latest issue of City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, Kay S. Hymowitz writes:
"Wave away the smoke of the Jackson family circus, Paris Hilton and the antics of San Francisco, and you can see how Americans have been self-correcting from a decades-long experiment with 'alternative values.' Slowly, almost imperceptibly during the 1990s, the culture began a lumbering, Titanic turn away from the iceberg."
Adults are changing, but kids seem to have changed most -- and they may comprise the new "greatest generation," as Tom Brokaw called the World War II cohort. "What is emerging," writes Hymowitz, "is a vital, optimistic, family-centered, entrepreneurial, and, yes, morally thoughtful, citizenry."
That's trouble, I believe, for the Democratic party, at least in its current anchored-to-the-'60s version. It's possible that John Kerry will win in November because of the war in Iraq (though the smart money is on George Bush), but the long-term trend is clear. College freshmen who call themselves liberals outnumbered conservatives by about three to one in 1971; now the figures are roughly even. "Young voters are also more supportive of President Bush than the public at large," writes Hymowitz.
The changes in politics are rooted in changes in values. Last year, the rate of teen pregnancy dropped to a record low. Better birth control is not the sole explanation; the proportion of teens who had intercourse fell from 56 percent in 1991 to 46 percent in 2001.
Kids don't want casual sex; they want families. Harris Interactive reports that 91 percent plan to marry and, on average, they'd like three children.
Already, Generation X (born between 1965 and 1979) is more traditional than its parents. "The number of married-couple families, after declining in the '70s and '80s," writes Hymowitz, "rose 5.7 percent in the '90s." More brides are taking their husbands' names, and in 2000, the number of women in the workforce with infants dropped for the first time in decades. A study by Yankelovich found that 89 percent of Gen Xers think modern parents let kids get away with too much.
Twice as many Gen-X mothers as Baby Boomer mothers (born 1946-1964) spent more than 12 hours a day "attending to child-rearing and household responsibilities," according to a new survey by Reach Advisors, and roughly half of Gen-X fathers spent three to six hours daily on such tasks, another big increase.
Meanwhile, student marijuana use, which rose sharply in the 1990s, is on the decline, as is binge drinking. The juvenile murder rate fell 70 percent between 1993 and 2001; burglary is down 66 percent. Schools are safer, too.
What's going on here?
Hymowitz offers four explanations: 1) a "rewrite of the boomer years," with young people reacting critically to the world of sexual experimentation and family breakup and "earnestly knitting up their unraveled culture," 2) the trauma of 9/11, which has made kids more patriotic and turned them inward toward the comfort of family, 3) the information economy, which has given young people greater faith in their own chances to succeed, especially through self-reliance and entrepreneurship, and 4) immigration, which has produced what she calls a "fervent work ethic, which can raise the bar for slacker American kids, as any higher schooler with more than three Asian students in his algebra class can attest."
Whatever the reasons, the change in young people and their parents is very, very good news -- which is precisely why so much of the media is ignoring it.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/071604E.html