National sovereignty may melt at climate conference

Imagine a team of clipboard-wielding, foreign bureaucrats fanning out across the United States to inspect and report on carbon emissions from American homes and hospitals, farms and factories, schools and power plants. Their reports feed into another batch of international bureaucrats sitting in Geneva, Brussels, or some other European capital. That committee's solemn charge: To pass judgment and slap penalties on the U.S. for any climatic shortcomings.

For fans of national sovereignty, it's not a pretty picture. But the U.S. may well take the first step toward that unhappy future at the United Nations' Copenhagen Climate Change Conference this month. There, "citizens of the world" will gather to hash out the framework of a "Kyoto II" treaty to fight global warming. United Nations and European Union mandarins begrudgingly admit that no fully developed treaty will emerge from the Copenhagen conference. But climate change mania certainly will not die in Denmark, if only because (to paraphrase Ronald Reagan) a U.N. program is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth. ......

.........The new international bureaucracy will serve as judge and jury as to whether the U.S. has: (1) met its greenhouse gas emissions targets, (2) transferred the proper amount of American taxpayer dollars (tens, if not hundreds, of billions) to countries in the "developing world," and (3) delivered its leading-edge green technology to those same countries - without compensation for the patent holders.

Certainly the U.S. will have some input in the proceedings, but Americans should harbor no illusions about who will have the final say. A committee (or committees) of international experts - whose members may include representatives from overtly hostile nations - will have the final word on whether the U.S. climate record is up to snuff. Whatever the judgments rendered by these "expert" committees, the U.S. will be legally obligated to comply with their rulings, since ratified treaties become the "supreme law of the land" under the U.S. Constitution.

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