I’d say you can’t make this stuff up — what, it only gets a headline in a WSJ blog, not the NYT? — but I did, or at least predicted the blistering double-standard that being applied to Presidents Obama and Bush when it comes to all things Kyoto.

Obama “climate envoy” Todd Stern “said the road map of greenhouse-gas emission reductions laid out at a 2007 summit in Bali was simply too ambitious. ‘We need to be very mindful of what the dictates of science are, and of the art of the possible,’ he said. The Bali targets — a 25% to 40% cut by industrialized nations by 2020 – were simply too ambitious. ‘It’s not possible to get that kind of number. It’s not going to happen’.”

What a target-rich environment, this conundrum, and all of the dogs failing to bark! “Bali” would be the “Bali roadmap” that the Bush administration agreed to as a parting shot. Was this merely some cheeky move to leave their successors with such a pickle? Say, sort of like Bill Clinton signing the International Criminal Court treaty on his way out, while admitting at the signing ceremony that even he didn’t agree with its terms. But, heck, wouldn’t be his problem any longer (if he keeps his nose clean while overseas). Or like Clinton signing Kyoto and then, how do we say, “moving on”?

No. It’s a double standard. The first confirmation of this was found within weeks of the election, when UN officials said that of course Obama wouldn’t be held to the standard to which Team Global Governance had — sometimes with extreme nastiness — held the Bush administration for eight years: you must sign on to a global warming treaty now or the world will end and you killed it . . . and, well, you know the rest, if you weren’t living on an island somewhere, enjoying a nice warm climate during the Bush-era global cooling.

Well, they had a very good reason for calming down, according to Yvo de Boer: Obama was new in office and besides, his heart’s in the right place, we know he’ll do the right thing but of course that Senate’s always a problem. Odd, I was in Bonn for the “emergency” COP-6.5 in 2001 after Bush indicated his intention to continue the Clinton-Gore policy of not seeking Senate ratification for Kyoto and, um, that’s not the approach you took at the time. Time and tides bring growth.

Today, de Boer, who is in town meeting with administration officials on these matters, greeted Todd Stern’s assessment with the Orwellian glee of, ”we’re really happy to see the United States back into the international climate change process.” By . . . rebuffing . . . what Bush . . . agreed to . . . in the international climate change process.

I can’t help but recall how a colleague mentioned to me during the Florida recount how our team was doomed if Bush was declared the victor, and in heather were Gore to prevail. The reason is that much of the population would respond to anything on the issue of global warming that Gore proposed as being presumptively extreme, while anything Bush proposed would be aggressively sold as presumptively not nearly enough, even if they both proposed the same thing.

Neither Bush nor Clinton-Gore asked for Senate ratification of Kyoto, nor withdrew from it. Neither Bush nor Gore ran for the presidency on the issue (that’s right, Al’s big on this only when there’s nothing but up$ide for him). I also believe you saw how differently the media treated Bush’s sins, which amounted to not having Congress present him legislation to sign and failing to keen with the alarmists in the meantime over the wretched state of Industrial Man. Bad Bush, baaaaad.

Obama’s OK, however, because he’s asking for it (double entendre intended…careful what you wish for) if not pushing for it quite so hard as was demanded of Bush. So, sit back and enjoy the next, oh, 14 months, through the June 2010 meetings in Bonn, as Obama is given a pass on a new treaty. Depending on how much of a spine EU industry finds, that may be time enough for everyone to agree to a graceful way out of this embarrassing panic. If not, however, either the “international community” will turn on Obama for failing to push the U.S. into the Kyoto swamp, or the American public will, for having done so.