Fiddling as the Planet Burns
Last week, Philip Cooney, a White House staffer, was exposed by the New York Times for revising reports on global warming so that they cast doubt on the link between greenhouse gases and rising temperatures. Mr Cooney, who has no scientific training whatsoever, resigned and took a job with Exxon Mobil, which is, incidentally, the company that produces twice the CO2 emissions of Norway and is currently facing a consumer boycott in Europe.
... Bush remains a delinquent simpleton in such matters. In the second draft of the G8 communiqué, the phrase 'our world is warming' has been placed in square brackets, which means that the statement is disputed by the US and is likely to be excluded from the final document. American officials also pressed negotiators to delete sections which tie global warming to human activity and emphasize the risk to economies.
James Connaughton who heads the US organization which, without a trace of irony, is called the Council on Environmental Quality, sought to reassure journalists with this statement: 'It's very important to view [the deletions] in context, which overall is one of strong consensus about a shared commitment to practical action.' How is the likely deletion of 'we know that the increase [of the earth's temperature] is due in large part to human activity' a commitment to practical action?
US policy seems to be simply one of cynical prevarication; at the very least, Bush and the oil companies are hopelessly behind the times. Jeffrey Immelt, head of General Electric, the largest company in America, gave a far-sighted speech to the George Washington Business School last month and, though he did not attack Bush's policy, he made a very strong case for mandatory controls on carbon dioxide emissions. Immelt is not the kind of guy to follow some whimsical scientific fad. He is a hard-nosed businessman; his advisers have told him about the problems ahead as well as the opportunities, and he has acted. As a result, GE is doubling its investment in energy and environmental technologies.
The penny has dropped with big business. In New York, a syndicate of two dozen institutional investors managing $3 trillion in assets recently asked American companies to confront urgently the risks of global warming. Even the oil industry outside America has got the message. Lord Oxburgh, non-executive chairman of Shell, said in a speech at the Hay-on-Wye Festival: 'We have 45 years, and if we start now, not in 10 or 15 years' time, we have a chance of hitting those targets. But we've got to start now. We have no time to lose.'
Governments will follow these men because they are in thrall to corporate power. Even the proudly retrograde US government will eventually fall in line, though almost certainly not under Bush. In all this, there is a telling lesson. It is that national governments generally lag behind sensible opinion and are rather slower to act than smaller units of government. If you look locally in the US, enlightened individuals are acting.
- posted by geoff @ #