Published on Sunday, November 19, 2000 in the Observer of London
US Plays Dirty As Planet Chokes
Squabbles as America fights to avoid reducing emissions
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines/111900-02.htm
by Robin McKie at The Hague
It took a surprisingly short time to sandbag the Hague yesterday. In
only two hours, environmentalists managed to surround the city's great
conference centre with a 5ft wall made up of 50,000 sacks filled with
soil and grit.
The activists - some from Latvia and Estonia, a few from Japan, several
coach-loads from Britain and hundreds from other nations - had gathered
to lay siege to the building in which diplomats and civil servants were
trying to thrash out ground rules for limiting global warming. It was a
manoeuvre replete with irony.
Rising industrial emissions of carbon dioxide are now heating the world
alarmingly, say scientists, and are accelerating natural climatic
warming, threatening to melt ice caps and flood low-lying areas. Hence
the sandbag, a particularly potent symbol in climate-vulnerable Holland.
However, the real eyebrow-raiser was the speed of the Friends of the
Earth stunt which contrasted starkly with the lumbering negotiations
that have been taking place within the convention centre. For the past
week, delegates have been trying to hammer out a framework for a
climate-saving deal that their ministerial bosses can then knock into
shape when they arrive tomorrow.
There have been few signs they are going to succeed. Despite evidence
that the greenhouse effect is now at its strongest for 20 million years,
that Europe's growing season has lengthened by 11 days in the past
century and that scientists are predicting all Arctic ice will have
disappeared by 2080, delegates remain obsessed with the minutiae of
conference protocol. As one leading UK negotiator put it: 'This could
turn out to be the most important conference in human history, yet all
we get is haggling over trivia.'
These squabbles threaten to erupt into full-scale war, particularly
between the United States and Europe, which began an alarming exchange
of insults late last week. One European Union statement even accused the
Americans of 'threatening the integrity' of the entire climate change
convention.
At heart, the problem is simple: how can the world halt the global
warming that is increasing global temperatures, sea levels and climatic
instability? At the Kyoto environment summit three years ago, the
industrialised nations agreed, in principle, to reduce carbon dioxide
emissions to a figure 7 per cent below their 1990 output. Unfortunately,
no one has been able to agree how to achieve this, or even to ratify the
Kyoto summit. That is the purpose of the Hague summit.
The prime problem is America, the world's greatest emitter of carbon
dioxide, which presses, with increasing insistence, that it should be
spared from reducing its output and should instead be allowed to create
new forests, both in the US and the Third World. These trees and plants,
known collectively as carbon sinks, will soak up all that nasty carbon
dioxide, say US delegates, and will obviate the need for Americans to
abandon their profligacy.
[snip]
At the end of the conference its organiser, the United Nations, hopes
that a group of developed nations that represent a total output of 55
per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions will be able to ratify the
Kyoto protocol. If that magic number is reached, the deal becomes an
international treaty. However, without the co-operation of the US, which
accounts for 24 per cent of the world's total output of carbon dioxide,
there is little likelihood of success.
And so the world's nations will square up to their climatic 'High Noon'
at the Hague tomorrow. On one side, Europe - led by Britain and Germany
and supported by the developing nations and green groups - is pressing
for real emission cuts. On the other, the US is backed by Canada,
Australia and Japan, nations which are desperate to avoid taking any
action that might risk the wrath of voters.
These, then, are the hate figures of the environment movement, a motley
crew that also includes any representative of an oil company, China
which wants to build more nuclear power stations and the
environmentalists' special bogeyman, Saudi Arabia, which is trying to
scupper the entire Kyoto protocol because it fears a downturn in petrol
use.
[snip]
) Guardian Newspapers Limited 2000
) Copyrighted 1997-2000 All Rights Reserved.
Common Dreams. www.commondreams.org