Leading the Pack

There's you in "U.S.," but there is "us:"

Washington rejected stiff 2020 targets for greenhouse gas cuts by rich nations at U.N. talks in Bali on Monday as part of a "roadmap" to work out a new global pact to fight climate change by 2009.

"It's prejudging what the outcome should be," chief negotiator Harlan Watson said of a draft suggesting that rich nations should aim to axe emissions of heat-trapping gases by between 25 and 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

Prejudging... heh. This is really the fault of all those scientists who have prejudged the future.

Can somebody remind me when we became the most backward industrialized nation in the world?