Glaciers are retreating in mountains from Alaska to the Andes to Tibet. An age-old Antarctic ice shelf the size of Rhode Island shatters and melts into the sea. Greenland's ice, which holds enough water to raise ocean levels 21 feet, is starting to melt. Yet James Inhofe, the Oklahoma senator and chairman of an environmental committee, calls global warming the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

Inhofe's thinking is echoed more mildly by the White House and is winning the day in the United States for now, at least politically.

It is not just a failure of diplomacy, as the Bush administration has been either unwilling to negotiate through international forums or inept at doing so. It is a failure of imagination as well. The administration's promised alternative to Kyoto has yet to coalesce in the form of policy.

The United States contributes more than a quarter of the world's pollution (and greenhouse gases). Its absence from the treaty means progress on emissions will be even slower, if at all effective.

Excerpts from The Daytona Beach News-Journal, United States.

(China Daily 02/19/2005 page4)