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TODAY Wednesday 10 December 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Oh Boy! A Fight!

Be still, my heart. I come into the office this morning and there's a call from McKibben on the voice mail, saying that the Americans and the Europeans have cut a deal at Kyoto, and maybe by the end of the day there might be a treaty text and maybe it won't be so bad. Would we want an extra dispatch reporting on how things turned out? Would we!

Then I read his daily dispatch and his brilliant concentration on the slumped shoulders of William O'Keefe -- chief honcho for Big Oil -- and I realize that the Vice President of the United States was not blowing smoke when he told the Wall Street Journal that he thought there would be a "knock-down, drag-out fight" in the US Senate (and among the American citizenry) about the final text from Kyoto. Maybe there will be such a fight after all. Thank God.

I care much more about that fight than I do about any of the particular provisions of the treaty. As McKibben says, the game is now squarely with public opinion. Just think: a short-term focus for a long-term purpose, a sanction for aggressive tactics on behalf of strategies for human peacefulness. A drawn-out (we hope) debate in the Senate and in the nation about the purposes of public policy, obligations to future generations, and competing ideas of prosperity and the commonweal. Plus unending insincerities on behalf of "working Americans." A good war! Sign us up.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

Yesterday's version of this column "Running Away From It All" contained some errors of fact and judgment, and a corrected version now replaces it. Sorry.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

12/9: Running Away From It All
12/8: "What I Wouldn't Give for This War to End."
12/5: Feisty Euros at Kyoto
12/4: Beauty in the Bronx
12/3: God from Machine
12/2: Gentlemen's Bet
12/1: Public Opinion
11/26: Sperm
11/25: Sound Sound-Bite Science
11/24: Home Sweet Storage Locker
11/21: Tim Wirth's Inscrutable Adventure
11/20: Better to Receive than to Give
11/19: Wes Jackson's Problem with Agriculture
11/18: "Stay Home and Be Decent"

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