WASHINGTON - The Kyoto Protocol for the control of greenhouse gases arrived stillborn in mid-February, and the event was a cause for celebration for anyone who cares about America’s economy and its workers.

Indeed, even as the champagne corks popped, Kyoto’s apologists were quietly admitting that the treaty would not prevent global warming, stating its importance was largely ‘‘symbolic.’’ After eight years and tens-of-millions of tax dollars spent: Kyoto is, indeed, an expensive symbol!

Contrary to the claims of America’s critics, the United States did not kill the treaty - rather, the seeds of Kyoto’s demise were planted in its very heart when it was created in Japan eight years ago.

If every country party to the treaty met their greenhouse gas targets, the Earth will be a negligible 0.07 degrees Celsius and 0.19 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than it would be absent Kyoto.

This is because swiftly developing powerhouses like China and India are not obligated to cut their emissions, even though they produce nearly half of all current greenhouse gas emissions and are predicted to produce as much as 85 percent of the future increase. Thus, if developed countries stopped all their greenhouse gas emissions, levels would still increase.

Kyoto wouldn’t help the environment, but it would do immense harm to the economy. According to Dallas Federal Reserve economist Stephen Brown, Kyoto’s emission cuts would reduce U.S. gross domestic product somewhere between 3.6 percent and 5.1 percent by 2010. The Department of Energy estimated that Kyoto would cause gasoline prices to rise by 52 percent and electricity prices to rise by 86 percent.

Wisely, the Bush administration charted a different course on global warming. In fact, it has spent more money - more than $6 billion per year - than any other government on the creation and promotion of technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while continuing economic growth.

These efforts include annual expenditures of $700 million in tax credits to promote clean technologies, $3 billion in research on new clean technologies and $200 million to transfer clean technology to developing countries. In the United States, industry is on course to meet the administration’s goal of reducing annual emissions of greenhouse gases per 1.5 percent per unit of GDP.

The administration also raised vehicle fuel efficiency standards for the first time in nearly 30 years. The modest increases should not result in people being forced into less safe vehicles, but will improve vehicle efficiency and thus lower greenhouse gas emissions.

In addition, the administration’s ‘‘Healthy Forests’’ plan should reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires that, in addition to harming wildlife and causing air and water pollution, annually release tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Healthy Forests also will replace stands of dead timber with living trees - dead trees release carbon, while live trees use carbon to grow.

In conjunction with industry, the U.S. government has taken the lead in research into carbon sequestration technologies. As a result the oil and gas industry annually pumps tons of carbon dioxide underground. This removes carbon from the atmosphere while boosting yields from marginal oil and natural gas fields.

Finally, the Bush administration crafted an international treaty turning the powerful greenhouse gas, methane, into a marketable product.

Department of Energy projections show that by 2015, the Methane to Markets program will remove 1 percent of all greenhouse gases that humans emit into the atmosphere.

This is the equivalent of taking 33 million cars off the road, or shutting down 50 coal-fired power plants or heating 7.2 million homes. In contrast to Kyoto, the program also produces some very tangible economic benefits.

Plugging leaks in natural gas pipelines means saving product. Methane captured at factory farms and landfills or produced from animal and plant waste can be used to fuel local power plants.

Neither the Kyoto Treaty nor the Bush administration’s efforts will prevent further human-caused global warming. But at least the administration’s efforts have the virtue of promoting continued economic growth, which is necessary if the world is to adapt to the impacts of a warmer world - regardless of the cause.

America will be blamed for disasters that climate change will unleash

Washington - On the picturesque nine coral atolls that make up the South Pacific nation of Tuvalu, global warming is having a disastrous impact.

Rising sea levels threaten to make Tuvalu the first nation in the world to become extinct as a result of the failure of the Bush administration to take seriously the problem of unchecked damage to the earth's ozone largely arising from the emission of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere.

In 1997, the United States and 54 other nations signed the Kyoto Protocol with a view to reducing the emission of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, which already is melting the polar ice cap and the world's few remaining glaciers.

In one of his first acts as president, George W. Bush thumbed his nose at science and the international community by denouncing Kyoto and pulling the United States, one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, out of the global process of limiting the ozone-layer-depleting pollutants.

Tuvalu, as far as the Bush administration is concerned, can just disappear into the Pacific Ocean. Already, the seawater that is filtering into the coral aquifers is poisoning the island nation's freshwater supply and destroying crops. Storm damage to the nation's coral reefs has adversely affected local fishing. High tides have swamped homes and roads. A number of Tuvalu's 11,000 Polynesian-Christian inhabitants have already done the unthinkable -- fleeing their beloved homeland because of the rising waters.

The Bush administration thinks nations such as Tuvalu are expendable. That did not stop it from signing up Tuvalu's Pacific neighbours -- Palau, Tonga and the Solomon Islands -- as members of the "Coalition of the Willing" in preparation for the attack on Iraq. Unfortunately, Tuvalu will be the first of many casualties of the administration's failure to join the international alliance to combat global warming.

After Tuvalu, other Pacific atolls will succumb, producing more refugees. When low-lying Bangladesh is swamped, millions of refugees will pour into neighbouring countries seeking higher land. American vacationers will no longer be able to visit Venice, Copenhagen, much of the Netherlands, New Orleans and Miami -- since they, too, will be submerged.

The recent tsunami in Asia showed what rising sea levels from global warming will one day do to low-lying coastal areas. The tsunami that washed over the Maldives chain in the Indian Ocean destroyed the island of Kandholhudhoo.

Its 3,000 inhabitants abandoned the island. Like Tuvalu, the island's water supply was contaminated by seawater and other contaminants.

Future natural calamities such as cyclones and monsoons will similarly affect other low-lying islands and coastal areas if something is not done soon to stop and reverse the effects of global warming.

While it may be too late for Bush to salvage anything from his presidency, rejoining the Kyoto system would provide an important glimmer of hope for many of the world's peoples.

And, perhaps even more important, it would also provide an example for other obstinate mega-energy consumers such as China and India -- two polluters that have no intentions of joining Kyoto as long as the United States remains an outsider.

While too late for the poor souls of Tuvalu, a commitment by the United States to put the interests of humanity, wildlife and the planet ahead of obscene corporate profiteering might provide a slight but positive reprieve in the history books for the Bush administration.