German Environment Minister Juergen Trittin was anything but diplomatic in a speech last week. "We can't let the country with the biggest emissions of greenhouse gases escape responsibility for protecting the global climate," he cautioned.

Back in March, when the international furor over Kyoto erupted, the Bush administration countered with two lines of defense: One was the argument that the foundations of the Kyoto Protocol were based on weak science. The other was that the administration needed time for a policy review to formulate its own approach to fighting global warming. Both of those arguments have collapsed completely.

A long-awaited National Academy of Sciences report commissioned by the White House to review the current science on global warming found that global temperatures are indeed rising and that "human activity" is a factor in climate change. The study's release effectively eliminated one of the most popular canards promoted by critics of the Kyoto Protocol: that the scientists who have repeatedly warned of global warming have used flawed scientific methodology to draw their conclusions.

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At least in its public statements, the Bush administration has devoted far more time to selling its energy plan than dealing with Kyoto. Bush's relentless "energy crisis" alarms bring to mind Jimmy Carter in his cardigan, turning down the heat in the White House. Nonetheless, the energy plan is not without its constructive elements. The left may hate nuclear power, but if the planet is in such grave danger of turning into an ice-cap-melting hothouse (read: flood, famine, apocalypse, etc.), then every option that reduces emissions ought to be explored. But as for coming up with any framework for moving past Kyoto, the administration appears to have done close to nothing -- and the Bush administration's high-level working groups on the subject have reportedly not even held all of their scheduled meetings.

Worse yet, Bush has failed to grasp that not only does Kyoto not have to be a bugaboo of this adminstration, it actually represents a political opportunity. Just as it's often said that only Richard Nixon, famous for his Manichean-world anti-communism, could go to Communist China without being branded a pinko tool, a politician like Bush -- seen as being at the service of the oil industry -- could make a real impact if he decided to embrace the treaty.

"Bush could end up being for global warming the equivalent of what Nixon was for China relations," said Per Peterson, chairman of the nuclear engineering department at the University of California at Berkeley.

That's why it seemed shortsighted of Bush to cite as his main reason for rejecting Kyoto the argument that it could be bad for U.S. industry. What if that turned out not to be the case? Let's presume for a moment that the Europeans, Japanese and others can convince the Bush administration that, in fact, Kyoto-style emission reduction would not be economically damaging and might even increase profits. Would Bush then have a leg to stand on if he continued to oppose it?

"The Kyoto Protocol may not hurt the U.S. economy if the rules are very favorable to the United States," Yusuke Shindo, a Japanese global-warming expert who consults with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, explained last week in Berlin.

The protocol would permit nations to trade credits for emissions as part of reaching their targets. Thus, credits could be bought and sold by industrial and developing nations alike -- potentially at great profit for the seller. It would also provide companies with incentives to innovate in order to meet the targets -- leading to greater economic efficiencies and increasing profits. In that sense, at least, it offers a free-market solution to the global-warming problem.

"As soon as Europe goes ahead with the protocol, I think we'll see that climate change is a very profitable business," Hermann Ott, head of climate policy at Germany's Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, said last week. Ott's comments were predicated on a scenario in which Europe ratifies without the United States, but with Japan and enough other countries to reach the required figure of 55 percent of the industrialized countries' emissions necessary to implement the treaty.

A recent report from the World Wide Fund for Nature explored the same scenario. The fund's report concluded that European industry could get a head start on developing new technologies to cut emissions if it observed the Kyoto Protocol. It said the European Union countries could reach 85 percent to 95 percent of the Kyoto targets without hurting their economic competitiveness. The same group issued another report suggesting that, for similar reasons, Japan would actually see an increase in GDP if it ratified the protocol and it moved forward.

Of course, there can be no guarantees that such economic prognostications will come true. But the American people have made clear they do not accept Bush's argument that potential economic sacrifice is a good reason to delay action on global warming.

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