Climate Deal Decades Away as `Dysfunctional' U.S. Delays Cap - Bloomberg

With President Barack Obama struggling to salvage his energy agenda and richer and poorer nations in conflict over extending Kyoto’s emission limits, a new worldwide climate treaty may be 20 years away, said Tim Wirth, who in 1997 led the U.S. delegation in Kyoto, Japan. Such a delay endangers the future of $2.7 billion a year in pollution credits sold under a UN program based on the Kyoto agreement.

“We have a dysfunctional Congress and an administration without policy,” Wirth, a former Democratic senator from Colorado, said in an interview during two weeks of UN climate talks in Cancun, Mexico. “The U.S. doesn’t have an energy strategy. You can’t sign up to an international treaty unless you know what you are going to do at home.”

[But wait a minute:  If we don't have an energy strategy, what are all these Department of Energy people doing all day?]

Employees 16,000 federal (2009)[1]
93,094 contract (2008)
Annual budget $24.1 billion (2009)
Department executives Steven Chu, Secretary