THE REPUBLICAN tornado has rained on Europe’s ecochondriacs. Hand-wringing supporters of the battered Kyoto treaty are overcast as Myron Ebell, one of George Bush’s senior climate change advisers, accused Sir David King, the Chief Scientific Adviser to the British Government, of being “alarmist”. Ebell stated that there would be no change in America’s environmental policy after Mr Bush’s re-election, and the reasons are clear.

In both the Senate and the House of Representatives, the Republicans have been returned with strengthened majorities and any measures seen to hinder the economy will be treated with disdain. And following the letter of the Kyoto Protocol would be expensive. Clamping down on carbon emissions could drain $1 trillion from the world economy, hit production and raise energy prices punitively.

Congress will have no truck with Europe’s whining over American withdrawal from the protocol. The electoral map reveals a swath of Republican red from Nevada to Virginia, from Texas to North Dakota — the heartland of the car and GM crops. The more snooty old Europe rattles on about these issues, the more it will drive a wedge between America and itself.

Tony Blair’s addiction to the Kyoto Protocol is dangerous. It is an assault on different cultural values which have been honed by history and the wider horizons of geography. More over, we know that the Kyoto Protocol will do nothing about climate change: at the most it will delay changes by two years over the next century. To declare otherwise is to mislead.

More embarrassingly, most European countries are far from attaining their own emission targets, although they freely lecture the good folk of Ohio and Oklahoma. More over, future energy demand does not lie in the West, but in the East, in China, India, Indonesia and Russia, most of which are not bound to make emission cuts by the Kyoto treaty. China will happily support Kyoto in theory, knowing that it can benefit economically as Western economies make themselves uncompetitive by donning the eco-hairshirt.

Like the vice-presidency, the Kyoto Protocol isn’t worth “a pitcher of warm spit” and the Republicans know it.

Philip Stott is Professor Emeritus of Biogeography in the University of London