KINDER'S COMMENTARY: AMERICANS AREN'T READY TO HAND AUTHORITY TO GLOBAL PANELS

Understand this about the U.N. treaty conference on global warming, just concluded in Kyoto, Japan: It isn't about the facts, it isn't about a sensible, achievable approach, it isn't even about arriving at a treaty that can be ratified by the U.S. Senate. (Shucks!~ There's that pesky U.S. Constitution again! Such an obstacle!) It is about a form of environmental extremism that isn't science so much as it is a neo-pagan religious faith, a form of Earth-worship directly competing with our ancient Judeo-Christian ethical tradition.

The politics that flows from this insight is most interesting. The American Left, unable to win elections in a clear left-right confrontation, knows it will be trounced when dressed in its traditional garb. So it has taken to cross-dressing. The Left knows it can't achieve its agenda of growing government and enacting the higher taxes to pay for it. Unless, that is, it can simultaneously foment panic about an alleged global catastrophe and appeal to a higher authority -- higher, even, than the lowly voter long thought to be decisive in the American system. In this case, an international tribunal will do quite nicely. U.N. officials are always ready for any role that will aid in their own self-aggrandizement, and never mind American sovereignty.

This is how we got to Kyoto. When Clinton administration types say, with straight faces, that there will be no new taxes, and no new regulatory schemes established, they are flat-out lying us all.

This is the administration, after all, that took office back in 1993 trying to enact a "carbon tax" on all fossil fuels. That one was the brainchild of some real geniuses in academia, but there were a few small political problems lying in its path. Result: At a time when Clinton's party had everything in sight -- the White House and both houses of Congress -- the Democratic leadership of Congress wouldn't even permit a vote on this carbon tax.

Back to the drawing board they went. This is how we got to Kyoto. You see, a trillion-six of your tax money, together with 40 percent or more of your earnings going to government, isn't enough. They just want more. If these people get their way, you'll pay more at the gas pump, more for utilities, more, more, more -- for everything. The real, rubber-hits-the-road political problems today, then, are no less serious for proponents than they were for Democrats in Congress, asked four years ago by Clinton and Gore to pass their carbon tax. The chances of U.S. Senate ratification of the Clinton-Gore U.N. treaty are a big, fat zero. If Al Gore wants a fight on this, why then, by all means, let's have it out with him.

In short, this U.N. treaty could be to environmental extremism what Hillary Clinton's health care plan was to the cause of government-run health care: Another historic, thoroughgoing, humiliating rout for the Left, with corresponding gains for freedom. For that to occur, however, congressional Republicans will have to find some leaders unafraid of being called lots of nasty names by our arrogant, self-appointed moral superiors on the Left.

My entire stack of chips is in the middle of the table on this bet: The American people aren't ready for any form of neo-pagan Earth-worship, still less for a hand-off of American sovereignty to the United Nations, just yet. The future will belong to those leaders with the stomach to stand up to our new, self-appointed emperors and disclose their nakedness.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.