The $13 trillion economy is precisely what makes the U.S. such an attractive looting target. If you look at the "solutions" proposed on an international basis for climate change, the commonality of intensive wealth transfer becomes pretty obvious.

The U.N. may be a laughingstock to rational people, but a huge segment of liberals still thinks the world would be a much better place if the U.N. were running it. Right now the U.N. doesn't actually call the shots themselves, but a lot of people who do call the shots around the world use the U.N. for their own purposes, and U.N. reports carry a lot of weight in politics. If I were a European, I'd be a lot more worried about the EU than the U.N.

Your use of Iran and North Korea as examples of treaty obligations probably wasn't wise. Many of us have noticed, like gbaikie below, that many treaties often tend to wind up as restrictions on the civilized, while the less-civilized sign them, totally ignore them, and laugh at the suckers.

Kyoto is largely a dead issue. It has been dead since 1997, when the Byrd-Hagel resolution, noting properly that the treaty as presented then was a thinly-disguised attack on the West, was passed 95-0, with 5 "not voting." After that, Clinton simply let the whole thing die on the vine.

Not surprisingly, if you asked a typical Democrat nowadays who killed Kyoto, they would tell you, with the perfect honestly of the ignorant, "George W. Bush."

Kyoto isn't working even for those who signed it (those who actually honestly attempted to follow it, that is) and other environmental cooperative agreements have mostly overtaken it.