UN head warns Chicago students about global warming
First visit to city by sitting head of international body
3:53 PM CST, February 8, 2008
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told students at Walter Payton College Prep. High School on Friday that global warming and climate change are the most important international issues facing the world today.
Ban was at the school to address students and observe a simulation of a United Nations debate on climate change and global warming involving students from more than 20 Chicago public high schools.
Accompanied by Mayor Richard Daley, Ban said he had witnessed the effects of global warming in Antarctica and was struck by how quickly the ice cap is melting.
"I believe it is the defining issue of our era. We have the resources [to fight it] the only thing we have lacking is the will,'' Ban said. "Unless we take action now, it will be too late."
Ban said he was in San Francisco recently, and was in Chicago to get local leaders to help pressure the national government to take the matter seriously.
"The local community is critically important when we want to have a global approach,'' Ban said.
Logan Cotton, a junior at Payton who represented the United States in the simulation, said he agreed with Ban's view that global warming was an important issue.
"It's humbling, it makes you think that the world really is so small now...if there is no planet for us to fight over, that's really what it comes down to,'' Cotton said.
Before attending Payton, which is the first school he has visited in his role as secretary general, Ban met with the Tribune editorial board where he expressed optimism about mediation efforts in Kenya and pessimism about Iran's intransigence on nuclear issues. And he made a plea for more U.S. support for the UN's far-flung peacekeeping missions.
Ban, in the first visit to Chicago by a sitting secretary general, called for a more consistent U.S. commitment to engage with the UN but refrained from criticizing the Bush administration, which has adamantly called for reform of the international body.
"The U.S. and UN have shared objectives and goals," Ban said. "It's not just the UN that needs the U.S. It's the U.S. that needs the UN for its own strategic objectives."
In the immediate term, Ban said, the U.S. should increase its financial commitment to supporting the UN's 100,000 peacekeeping troops on the ground in 20 hot spots worldwide. "It was you, America and Europe, that really talked loud and clear that we need action," Ban said. "Now we have taken action. There are resources [we need]. We still lack assets such as helicopters and transport equipment."
Ban said that while there have been widespread international calls for peacekeeping troops to intervene in violent conflicts in Chad and Kenya, the UN cannot be effective in those places without enough resources and equipment, helicopters, in particular, he added.
On the diplomatic front, Ban expressed optimism about progress in engaging North Korea through negotiations involving the U.S. and five other countries hoping to prevent North Korea from building nuclear arms. But he was not as optimistic about a similar challenge in efforts to halt Iran's nuclear program.
"I'm worried that the patience of the international community is now thinning, getting thinner and thinner," Ban said. In Kenya, where widespread violence followed a December election dispute, negotiations mediated by Ban's predecessor, Kofi Annan, appeared Friday to be leading toward a deal in which President Mwai Kibaki would share power with opposition leader Raila Odinga.
Ban, who visited Kenya last week to participate in the talks, would not make a specific comment on details of any proposed arrangement, but he did seem to imply that Kibaki must compromise in order to reach a productive outcome. "The flexibility can only come from the person holding the power," Ban said. "If you want to hold everything in your hand, you may lose everything."
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