LETTER: Stand behind Bush on Kyoto treaty

Editor,

This letter is in response to a recent editorial about the environment that ran the first week of school. President Bush, and Republicans in general, are under fire from the left for not supporting the Kyoto protocol.

The accusation was that Republicans don’t care about our environment. Nothing could be more from the truth. The intent of the Kyoto protocol is to reduce global greenhouse emissions by 5.5 percent from 1990 levels.

The Kyoto protocol could actually increase greenhouse emissions. How, you ask?

Polluting factories would simply move to developing nations, like Mexico, and produce even more pollution. Being more environmentally friendly is more expensive than not being environmentally friendly. As a result of these increased costs, factories close, people lose jobs, and pollution goes up. Your once relatively clean factory moves to some third world country that doesn’t have pollution laws and produces even more pollution. While America has achieved its goal of reducing greenhouse gases at the cost of American jobs, global pollution has gone up.

Nobody wants a dirty environment, even Republicans, but you cannot ignore the price. If price didn’t matter, college students wouldn’t complain about increased tuition, eat Ramen every day and drive their beat up cars.

Price matters, and the price of the Kyoto protocol is hundreds of thousands of American jobs for nothing more than increased global pollution. So, while I do not support everything Bush does, like increasing steel tariffs, I stand behind him on the Kyoto treaty.

Jared Wolfe