If it's good enough for the Chinese, it's good enough for us!

Peter Brown:

Let's be clear here. Europe is the past. Asia is the future. The European Union entered the 21st century claiming it would become the United States of Europe - that is an economic super power and a political counterweight to rival Uncle Sam.

The jury's still out, but with double-digit unemployment, staggering social welfare costs and a standard of living roughly two-thirds of ours in much of Western Europe, the United States has little to fear at the moment in that direction.

China, India and the other Asian tigers are a different story. Their economies are growing robustly; their middle classes expanding with jobs that migrated there from the West due to lower labor costs, higher productivity and, in some cases, greater quality.

Yes, Yurp is a truly aweful place. Why would Americans feel the need to become like that if we too could have shantytowns and roll back labor safety standards?

Those Asian nations have not been asked to institute the same mandatory emissions controls as the G8 because they had little to do with creating the warming problem to begin with. Until recently they had agrarian economies.

Yet the kinds of scrubbers, other pollution controls and limits on carbon dioxide emissions being proposed for the G8 will increase costs that will be passed on to consumers. If those costs are tacked on the goods made by some nations and not others, it's easy to see how that will reshape the world's economic order.

Bush's view is that because the Asian nations will be among the world's largest economies they must be included in any solution. He rejects the Europeans' one-size fits all approach that would require all nations take the same exact steps to meet an emissions reduction target.

Call Bush names if you want. But understand why he is taking the flak.

For that matter, we may as well also get rid of human rights, democracy and a free press while we're at it.