Why U.S. Environmentalists Pin Hopes on Europe
From Time.com:
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Activists hope President Bush will find European leaders more
persuasive than Christie Whitman on global warming
BY DICK THOMPSON
Monday, Mar. 26, 2001
After returning from a meeting with the environmental ministers of the G-8
industrialized nations this month, EPA administrator Christie
Whitman wrote a private memo to President Bush informing
him that the U.S. has a credibility problem when it comes to
climate change. "The World Community," wrote Whitman on
March 6, "[is] all convinced of the seriousness of this issues
and the need to act now." She "strongly recommended" that
Bush "recognize that global warming is a real and serious
issues" and said "we need to appear engaged."
'Kyoto is dead'
President Bush energetically ignored that advice when he did a
U-turn on his campaign pledge to control carbon dioxide from
power plants. His questioning of the science behind global
warming didn't do much to overcome the administration's
credibility problem, either. After a series of reports issued by
the U.N. this year, most observers believe the science is a lock.
Many European officials expressed their concern about Bush's
decision. And European ambassadors were shocked when
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told them at a
private lunch at the Swedish embassy in Washington last week
that "Kyoto is dead."
The Kyoto Protocol is the only tool on the table to control the
greenhouse gases that are driving global warming. But that
treaty has been rejected by the Bush administration as unfair
because, initially, it does not require developing countries to
cut their emissions. However, many observers believe Bush
opposes it because the U.S. is by far the greatest
greenhouse-gas polluter, and controlling fossil fuel emissions
might injure the economy.
"The Kyoto Protocol is the only game in town in their eyes,"
Whitman also wrote the President. "There is a real fear in the
international community that if the U.S. is not willing to discuss
the issue within the framework of Kyoto the whole thing will fall
apart."
Educating W.
With the doors to the White House now apparently closed to
them, U.S. environmentalists are now pinning their hopes that
European heads of state will be able to educate Bush about the
scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet,
and that the problem may reach catastrophic levels by the end
of the century. German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who is
visiting Washington this week, has put climate change in the
second spot on his agenda for discussions with Bush,
following the conflict in Macedonia.
American environmentalists are also hoping that all the other
industrialized countries will ratify Kyoto by the end of 2003,
even without the U.S. on board. This would present a complex
business environment for multinationals who then might be
enlisted into supporting the treaty in the U.S.
U.S. and Euro environmentalists play pass the potato
While American environmentalists now see foreign
governments as their best hope for saving the world from
global warming, European environmentalists want more action
from Greens in the U.S.
"Rather than hanging out in D.C., waiting for a dinner invitation
from someone from the White House, they should to into the
country and work with people" to build grassroots support for
Kyoto, says Stephan Singer, a World Wildlife Fund official in
Brussels. "They should go explain to farmers who are opposed
to Kyoto and to unions opposed to Kyoto that there cannot be
coal mining forever." |
