This past Sunday, Al Gore tried to defend his failure to mention the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, or the Clinton Administration's relative inaction on climate change, in a review of Ross Gelbspan's Boiling Point. (I commented on the review here). Gore writes:

The ''Sense of the Senate'' resolution that Ed Koch refers to actually took place five months before the Kyoto Protocol was even written, and was aimed at providing guidance to the negotiators on general principles. During the political give-and-take over its wording, that resolution was eventually stated so broadly that even the strongest supporters of a tough treaty ended up supporting it. Indeed, the author of the resolution, Senator Robert Byrd, has publicly criticized the subsequent misrepresentation of its meaning by opponents of Kyoto.

The fact that the protocol was not ratified by the Senate during the two years between its signing and the end of the last administration is evidence of the vigorous opposition by the Republican Congress to confronting the global climate crisis. But the record certainly does not support the allegation in Lewis Regenstein's letter that President Clinton and I ''did almost nothing'' to overcome that opposition or to promote public awareness of what is at stake. There are way too many examples to list here, but anyone interested can go to www.environment2004.org to find lots of them.

This is quite disingenuous on several counts.

The text of the Byrd-Hagel Resolution unambiguously rejected the substance of Kyoto. The resolution provides:

(1) the United States should not be a signatory to any protocol to, or other agreement regarding, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of 1992, at negotiations in Kyoto in December 1997, or thereafter, which would--

(A) mandate new commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for the Annex I Parties, unless the protocol or other agreement also mandates new specific scheduled commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for Developing Country Parties within the same compliance period, or

(B) would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States;

Kyoto would not impose "specific scheduled commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions" on developing countries. Therefore, under Byrd-Hagel, Kyoto is off limits. Period. Senator Byrd can say whatever he likes. There is no way to reconcile the Kyoto Protocol with the text of the Byrd-Hagel Resolution.

As for the rest, Gore can blame "Republican" opposition all he likes, but the resolution was bipartisan (indeed, it was unanimous). Moreover, the Clinton Administration a) never submitted Kyoto to the Senate for ratification, b) never sought legislation to impose binding limitations on greenhouse gas emissions (though it did, in 1993, briefly push for an energy tax), and c) never sought to regulate greenhouse gases unilaterally (though the Clinton EPA claimed they could), despite lawsuits seeking to force EPA's hand.

To be fair, the Clinton-Gore Administration did adopt various policies that beat up on carbon-based fuels, particularly coal (e.g., NSR prosecutions, NAAQS revisions, mercury proposals, etc.), but climate change was not the stated reason for these policies. And Gore certainly wrote and lectured about the threat, even comparing early climate change to the Holocaust. In the end, however, the Administration did little more than posture on climate change, and the Byrd-Hagel resolution was almost certainly the reason why.