Mr. Chairman, I thank you for holding this hearing today.

Our witnesses today will try to defend an ill-conceived and badly executed Kyoto agreement on climate change by claiming -- repeatedly -- that it is a work in progress, and that the Administration achieved two of its three negotiating objectives in Kyoto.

That reminds me of the Confederate who would brag that the South won the first and second battles of Bull Run, while conveniently omitting the nasty little detail that his side lost the war.

Certain facts are inescapable. One of them is that nothing in the Kyoto agreement requires anything from the developing countries. Those countries, including most significantly, China, are already some of our toughest competitors. When the Congressional delegation in Kyoto asked the Chinese government delegation when China might sign the agreement, we got the following answer: Not this year, not by 2010, not by 2020, and not by 2050, and probably not ever.

I don't have a great quarrel with the domestic component of the Administration's program on climate change, as announced thus far. I support the research and incentives being proposed, though largely for reasons entirely unrelated to climate change. But that program alone will hardly lead to the kind of emission reductions to which the Administration is committed.

I will be especially interested this morning in Ms. Yellen's testimony on the costs of the climate change agreement. In her last appearance, she said efforts to perform an economic analysis of climate change were, and I quote, "futile." I'll be fascinated to hear about the epiphany that now causes her to estimate with precision costs of $70 to $110 a household. I'll be further interested in the so-called savings from an electricity deregulation plan that no one has seen and hasn't been written.

Mr. Chairman, the Administration has produced an agreement in Kyoto that will benefit neither the environment -- if you accept the theory of global warming -- or the economy, if you recognize the reality of competitive advantage.

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