A Bonn surprise

But Bonn was not an empty exercise. And neither, it now seems, is the Kyoto Protocol. Even if it leads to little or no actual reduction over 1990 levels, it is still likely to result in limiting global increases in emissions -- and it stands as a potential monument to what international efforts can accomplish.

"It's a brilliant day for the environment," British Environment Minister Michael Meacher told Reuters on Monday. "It's a huge leap to have achieved a result on this very complex international negotiation. It's a huge relief."

Clearly the U.S. has failed to perceive the extent to which Bush's rejection of Kyoto united Europeans on this issue. Yes, Bush has the beginnings of a point when he says science falls short of explaining the measurable increase we are seeing in global temperatures, including oceans. Is the trend dire, or part of normal fluctuations? But as many in Europe and elsewhere keep pointing out, room for doubt does not seem to bother Bush much when it comes to his missile defense shield. The watered-down version of Kyoto fits fairly neatly with the international consensus that some action must be taken on global warming -- even if it is only preliminary -- because stepping up efforts later is much easier if action has already begun.

"I prefer an imperfect agreement that is living to an imperfect agreement that doesn't exist," said the chief European Union negotiator Olivier Deleuze, striking a representative note of world-weary irony.

The Bonn talks also served as a sad postscript to the weekend's street fighting in Genoa for the G-8 talks. Unfair as it is for a small element of anarchists to grab attention away from the thousands of peaceful demonstrators, that is just what happened. The practical effect seems to be fewer such meetings in the future. The most powerful men in the world will hold more of their meetings in private, it appears. But street protest can up the ante on politicians, especially when it is carried out with decorum and honor, and that is what the thousands of environmentalists who converged on Bonn showed.

Besides the Bonn protesters, the chorus of voices urging Bush to rethink his position on Kyoto includes politicians like Sen. Jim Jeffords, I-Vt., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and the New York Times editorial page. But their cause looked hopeless so long as the Europeans were unable to keep Kyoto on track, with or without the United States. Now that they have salvaged the agreement, the stakes just got higher for Bush, and environmental politics has become as lively and unpredictable a form of international struggle to follow as any other.

"We have left environmental politics behind, so to speak," said Hermann Ott, head of climate policy at Germany's Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. "Now we have only world politics, and power politics."

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