Climate debate over, time for action: Gov. Arnie

Gwynne Dyer, London

"The debate is over. We know the science. We see the threat posed by changes in our climate. And we know the time for action is now." So wrote Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of California, explaining his commitment last month to cut the state's greenhouse gas emissions below the 2000 level by 2010, and below the 1990 level by 2020.

Over one-tenth of Americans live in California. Another sixth live in other states and cities that have pledged to cut emissions back to 7 percent below 1990 levels over the next seven years -- a deeper reduction than the European Union has committed itself to.President Bush will once again say no to action on climate change at the G-8 summit in Scotland this week, but it just doesn't matter as much as it used to.

Last month, the scientific academies of all the G-8 countries, including the United States, issued a call for this year's summit to acknowledge that climate change is happening and to take action now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.As host, Prime Minister Tony Blair has made action on climate change a high- priority issue on this year's G-8 agenda, but President Bush will not be moved. Interviewed by British television last week, he said that his faithful British sidekick could expect no "quid pro quo" on the climate issue in return for having dragged Britain into the war in Iraq.

In response to this, the debate among the other seven countries has moved on: Should they dodge the issue of global warming at the G-8 entirely, or to make a strong statement in support of further measures to curb climate change and see the U.S. refuse to sign it. That argument will continue even after the leaders arrive at Gleneagles on Wednesday, but it hardly matters which way it comes out.

The real decision to proceed without the United States was taken when Kyoto went into effect four months ago, after Russia ratified it. All of the world's other industrialized countries except Australia are committed to proceed with the emission cuts mandated by Kyoto, to negotiate deeper cuts in a second round, and to find ways to include large developing countries like China and India in the process.And leaving the U.S. to catch up later is getting to be a habit.

A treaty of global scope that omitted the U.S. was once unthinkable, but it's now thirteen years since the first time that the rest of the world, in exasperation, just decided to get on with an international treaty, leaving America to sign up whenever some subsequent administration sorted out the politics in Washington. That was the Law of the Sea Treaty, rejected by the Reagan administration in 1982 but brought into effect in 1994 after 140 other countries ratified it.The U.S. Senate is still struggling to ratify it, but in the rest of the world it is already law, and in practice the U.S. usually goes along with it.It just has no say in how it is administered.

In the later 1990s it became increasingly common for international treaties to get around American roadblocks by simply leaving the U.S. out. The Land Mines Convention and the International Criminal Court were the most notable ones, and strenuous U.S. attempts to sabotage the working of the ICC came to naught.In a way, President George W. Bush's rejection of the Kyoto Accord and everybody else's decision to go ahead with it anyway were almost routine.They felt they had no choice -- but the fact that the United States alone accounts for some 25 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions did seriously impair the treaty's effectiveness.

That was the worry in 2001, when Bush "unsigned" Kyoto. It is much less of a worry in 2005.The extraordinary strength of special interest groups in Washington and the paralysis that so easily occurs in a political system built on a sharp division of powers make it hard for any U.S. administration to move at the same speed as the rest of the world, even with the best will in the world.But the American people do not live on a different planet from the rest of the human race, and they too are starting to notice that the climate is changing in worrisome ways.

American cities and entire states are already taking independent action to cut emissions, and American industry is gradually realizing how great a disadvantage it will face if its rivals elsewhere become more energy-efficient in a world where the cost of fossil fuels is soaring.The U.S. will be along sooner or later, and it is now generally agreed that it is not worth making major concessions to the Bush administration in the hope of getting its cooperation.Wait forty more months for the next presidential election, and by then events -- more and bigger hurricanes, floods, droughts and heat-waves -- will probably have convinced American voters that it is time to sign.

The writer is a London-based independent journalist.