HAVING DISPENSED with those annoying environmentalists in Johannesburg,
Secretary of State Colin Powell rushed off to what could have been called
the World Summit on Sustainable Drilling. His itinerary was Angola and
Gabon. The surface reason was to encourage continued peace in Angola and
to take a 10-minute photo-op walk in a rain forest in Gabon.
Unmentioned in Powell's itinerary is that Angola and Gabon are two
oil-rich nations that the United States, the leviathan of energy
consumption, is looking to swallow. Sub-Saharan Africa currently provides
15 percent of US oil imports. The government estimates that the figure
will increase to 25 percent by 2015.
Walter Kansteiner, assistant secretary of state for Africa, said,
''African oil is of national strategic interest to us, and it will
increase and become more important as we go forward.'' Kansteiner has gone
so far to say, ''that's really the primary focus of what our policy
is.''
Which is to say that the focus of US policy is not what was discussed
in Johannesburg. At the 10-day World Summit on Sustainable Development,
Powell added an exclamation point to the feigned interest of the United
States in the proceedings. First, President Bush declined to join the more
than 100 world leaders who found it important enough to attend. Second,
Powell arrived after most of the world leaders had already left.
Third, he arrived after the United States tried to avoid serious
commitments to sustainable development. The United States led the way in
defeating proposals by the European Union and Brazil that would have set
targets and deadlines to decrease the percentage of energy derived from
oil and increase the percentage of solar and wind energy.
That was not a surprise, since one of Bush's early acts as president
was to pull out of the Kyoto Treaty on global warming.
But the United States even opposed setting timetables to help the
world's estimated 2.4 billion people who lack basic sanitation. After
vigorous debate, the United States agreed to go along with the rest of the
conference to set a goal of cutting the number of people without
sanitation by half by 2015. The conference ended with other pledges to
preserve the oceans, maintain biodiversity, and reduce poverty, but the
United States made sure that other than sanitation, few declarations came
with commitments to a timetable the world could measure. The mantra of US
negotiators, as expressed by John Turner, another assistant secretary of
state, was, ''Targets for the sake of targets has never been our
objective.''
Unless the target is oil. Just as the environmental summit was
concluding, the world's oil producers were convening in Brazil, talking
about how to meet expanding demand. Ali Rodriguez, the head of Venezuela's
state-owned petroleum company and a former head of the Organization of
Petroleum Exporting Countries, said world oil demand will explode from the
current 76 million barrels a day to 120 million barrels by 2020. Abdallah
Jum'ah, president of Saudi Aramco, bragged, ''We have 3 million barrels of
capacity that is ready whenever the world wants it.''
In justifying the need to drill all over the world, the oil companies
are hiding behind the human shield of the world's poor. David O'Reilly,
the CEO of Chevron/Texaco, asked, ''How do we enable these 3 billion
people, mostly in the developing world, to have a standard of living that
approaches the one that many of us now enjoy in the developed world?''
O'Reilly, of course, would have us forget that too many oil companies have
a legacy, most notably of late in Nigeria, of exploiting oil-rich fields
while contributing virtually nothing to the development of the local poor
and fouling their water.
This makes Powell's appearance in Johannesburg laughable for lines such
as ''The American soul has always harbored a deep desire to help people
build better lives for themselves and their children'' and ''We have
always understood that our own well-being depends on the well-being of our
fellow inhabitants of this Planet Earth.'' This is after Powell's
negotiators lowered the conference to the most vague of pledges for our
fellow inhabitants, telling them they are not worthy of goals or
timetables. They are certainly not as important as counting oil barrels.
With the United States working hard for big oil, it is a miracle that
the Johannesburg summit produced any document at all. It makes it fitting
that Powell scheduled only 10 minutes to walk in a rain forest in Gabon.
That is about the length of the Bush administration's attention span to
the well-being of Planet Earth.
Derrick Z. Jackson is a Globe columnist.
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