World-leaders do little about global warming

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): When the human race is confronted with a global problem of great urgency and complexity, like global warming, we know exactly what to do: hold a special one-week conference at the United Nations where all the world's heads of government can make five-minute speeches about it.

If you schedule the conference right after the G-8 summit in Denver, you can even get the leaders of the major powers to come to New York for the occasion. It's another good photo opportunity, and they're already in the United States anyway.

It's so easy to mock the five-year review conference on the 1992 Rio "Earth Summit" that there should probably be a law against it.

All this week at the UN, national leaders will march up to the podium to gloss over their own countries' failure to meet the commitments they made at Rio in 1992, and exhort the world to do better next time. If you think that this is merely a hypocritical exercise in evasion, however, you are missing the point.

The United Nations conference is a public relations exercise, but that is necessary and worthwhile in a world where public opinion must be persuaded to support whatever policy the leaders adopt. And most of the leaders, contrary to folk wisdom on these matters, actually do understand what needs to be done. They just can't do it until public opinion backs them.

The primary focus of the rhetoric this week is on global warming, the biggest threat to the stability of the global environment. That is because six months from now, in Kyoto, Japan,a large and serious conference will try to reach a legally binding agreement on how much each country must reduce its output of 'greenhouse gasses' over the next 10-20 years.

Nothing will get decided at New York, but Kyoto is the culmination of a years-long negotiating process that will either give us hope of stabilizing global temperatures and sea levels close to familiar levels, or condemn us to drastic changes within the next generation, If it fails, there will not be time to build up to another such conference before the crisis is upon us.

There is no longer any serious scientific doubt about the phenomenon of global warming, and few government leaders doubt it either. But "all politics is local politics," as U.S. Congressman 'Tip' O'Neill once observed. Most national leaders cannot ignore their local special-interest lobbies until their pressures are outweighed by coalitions of concerned citizens and strong external pressures.

Take, for example, U.S. President Bill Clinton, who will speak at the UN on Thursday. He has so far refused to set specific targets for reducing U.S. carbon emissions, despite demands from the 'green' lobby at home and pleas from key international allies like the leaders of the European Union.

They have to get the United States to cooperate, because it accounts for almost a quarter of global emissions all by itself. So far, Clinton simply won't commit himself. Yet does anybody doubt that Bill Clinton -- or Vice-President Al Gore, the 'greenest' senior figure in U.S. politics -- wants the United States to do its part in reducing carbon emissions? Of course they do.

It's just that Clinton and Gore must contend with a highly nationalistic U.S. Senate where a majority recently indicated that they would block emission controls that do not hit developing countries like China just as hard as the U.S. (where everybody has had cars, fridges and air conditioners for several generations).

They must also contend with rich and powerful coal, oil, and automobile industry lobbies opposing change. And they have to sell the idea of cutting carbon emissions to an American public that regards an endless supply of cheap gas as a sacred American right, on a par with the right to keep a pistol under the pillow.

So did Clinton and Gore really mind when British Prime Minister Tony Blair told the UN on Monday: "We in Europe have put our cards on the table (offering a 15 percent cut on 1990 emission levels by 2010). It is time for the special pleading to stop and for others to follow suit." Of course not. They need that kind of external pressure to help justify a change in domestic policy.

The same argument holds even for the most reluctant countries of all, Australia and the oil-producing states of the Gulf. Australia's heavy dependence on coal for domestic consumption and for export drives it to oppose any mandatory emission controls. The Gulf states even demand financial compensation if emission controls cut into the price or volume of their oil exports (rather like buggy-whip manufacturers demanding reparations from Henry Ford).

But intelligent human beings are not scarcer in the Australian and Gulf state governments than in the rest of the world. What they say in public (because they must, for domestic consumption) is not necessarily what they think in private. If a strong consensus in the international community compelled their countries to accept global limits on carbon emissions, they would not be unhappy. But they need the push.

That is what the whole show in New York this week is about. Large public displays of concern about the situation, amplified by the global media, help to bring the more recalcitrant countries along.

Not that the outcome is assured. The fossil fuels lobby, operating behind innocuous-seeming fronts like the 'Global Climate Coalition', has enormous financial resources and political clout. The actual deal that must be struck is fiendishly complex, with the old-rich industrialized countries taking deeper cuts in carbon emissions so that some room is left for newly industrializing countries to grow. And the December deadline is real.

"It's 50-50 whether Kyoto ends disastrously or fairly well,"Greenpeace UK deputy chief Chris Rose guessed recently. The tedious recital of rhetorical good intentions now unfolding in New York, frustrating as it is to those who already understand the problem, is an indispensable part to this process.

The writer is a London-based independent journalist and historian whose columns appear in 35 countries.