What next, a call for Bush to sign the Treaty of Versailles? Some at the Quai d’Orsay really should tell President Chirac that the USA has already signed the Kyoto Protocol, but the Senate won’t ratify it. Let’s face it, if Sen. Boxer is happy enough to break protocol in her very first hearing as Chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, she should be happy to break protocol and bring Kyoto to the floor for a vote; after all, it is the most dangerous threat facing the planet, she tells us. She won’t, though, at least partly because she knows she’d lose.

In the meantime, my colleague Chris Horner sums it up neatly, “As with so much in the climate change debate, this de rigueur call to sign Kyoto does not represent informed opinion but merely establishes the treaty as a political totem in the anti-Bush struggle.”