In the first months of the administration, O'Neill and EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman, the Republican former governor of New Jersey, both became engaged in carrying forward the President's campaign promise to limit emissions of carbon dioxide, the gas that causes global warming. President Bush asked O'Neill in their first meeting to get him an action plan on global warming. This February memo from Treasury official John Hambor shows the department acting on the assumption that the administration would remain engaged, in some fashion, in Kyoto.

A core group of Republican Senators, led by Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, spearheaded Congressional opposition to limits on greenhouse gas emissions. In February, 2001, Hagel was concerned that Clinton holdovers within the new administration might continue to conduct international negotiations that would bind the U.S. to climate controls. On March 1, 2001, Secretary of Commerce Don Evans faxed a package of documents to Secretary O'Neill that alerted the Treasury secretary to Hagel's worries. The package included an anonymous letter on State Department stationery warning that two Clinton administration holdovers "are seeking to box the Bush administration into a corner where it will have to choose between a bad deal and international embarrassment." Both men were gone within five months.

In late February, 2001, Paul O'Neill sent a memo to the President explaining how he thought the administration should proceed on the sensitive issue of global warming. While many of the president's supporters opposed the Kyoto treaty on principal -- believing that global warming concerns were either overstated or a hoax -- O'Neill opposed Kyoto because he felt it was poorly negotiated and too weak. Its impact, he wrote to President Bush, would be "trivial." A more effective global response to the threat of climate change was needed. O'Neill recommended that the president convene an ecumenical panel of experts to devise a better way to tackle the issue of climate change.

Upon returning from a G-8 climate change summit in Italy in March, 2001, EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman sent a strongly worded memo to President Bush urging the administration to remain engaged in international climate change negotiations. "I would strongly recommend that you continue to recognize that global warming is a real, and serious issues," she wrote. "Mr. President, this is a credibility issue (global warming) for the U.S. in the international community." A few days later, against Whitman's advice, President Bush sent a letter to Congressional opponents of action on global warming. It made clear that the U.S. would pull out of any engagement on Kyoto and not regulate carbon emission from U.S. power plants, as was promised during the campaign.