Many Americans would have been startled to see the way Europe's press covered last week's statements from the Bush administration about the Kyoto agreement on global warming. When Christie Whitman, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, said that the agreement was "effectively dead", they might have supposed she was stating the obvious—given George Bush's opposition to the treaty throughout his election campaign, and the fact that the Senate (which would have had to ratify it before it could take effect) passed a resolution denouncing the plan by an adequate margin of 95-o. Yet the remark, and later amplifications, were greeted abroad with astonishment and outrage.
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