Is America the Villain in Bali?

Cthippo · 13 Dec 2007

Time.com said:

For Al Gore, it was time to utter a new inconvenient truth that diplomatic niceties precluded others from telling: "My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here," he told a packed audience at the U.N. climate change summit in Bali. "We all know that."

The former Vice President spoke shortly after European Union officials had resorted to an unusually public show of anger by threatening to boycott U.S.-sponsored climate talks in Washington next month to protest the Bush Administration's opposition to negotiating over setting limits on carbon emissions. Earlier in the day Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) told reporters that he feared the summit could fail to conclude an agreement before it closes on Dec. 14. De Boer, as a U.N. official, couldn't be so blunt as to name the culprit, but there were no such restraints on Gore.

The Nobel laureate, in fact, urged delegates to push ahead despite U.S. opposition, even to the point of drafting a negotiating document with blank spaces where American participation should be. But while Gore's public criticism of his own country's delegation - and implicitly, of the President who controls it - electrified his audience, what he said next was even more important. "Over the next two years, the United States is going to be somewhere it is not right now," said Gore. "We are going to change in the U.S."

That the U.S. leadership is deeply divided on climate change has been patently obvious to even the most casual observer here. Washington's official delegation has emerged as the chief spoiler in moves to take meaningful action on climate change. But among the most vocal critics of the official delegation has been an array of American environmentalists, legislators and state and local government officials. Carl Pope, president of the Sierra Club, called the U.S. performance "the most explicitly irresponsible action that any American administration has taken in any of our lifetimes."

But the purpose of the shadow U.S. delegation here - spiritually led by Gore and including the likes of Sen. John Kerry, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and dozens of officials from California (Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had planned to attend, but budget negotiations kept him at home) - is to signal the world that the Bush Administration no longer represents the views of most Americans on climate change. They point to the fact that U.S. cities, states and, now, the Congress have taken steps to combat global warming, and that next year's election will likely accelerate that momentum. "The message here is that help is on the way," says Mike Chrisman, California's Secretary of Resources.

Despite the scientific work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlighting the urgency of deep and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the U.S. - along with Japan, Australia and Canada - has resolutely opposed a European push for the Bali delegates to discuss targeted emissions cuts. That opposition isn't surprising, because the Bush Administration has never hidden its opposition to mandatory cuts. But observers here say the U.S. obstructive role has been more egregious, stymying attempts to craft meaningful action on everything from deforestation to measures to help developing nations manage their carbon output. "The U.S. has been fingered as the problem here - and they really are," says John Coequyt, climate adviser for Greenpeace.

The Administration's intransigence is all the more glaring in contrast to the positions of the climate progressives from the Senate and the states who've come to Bali. Even as White House Council on Environmental Quality chairman James Connoughton on Thursday defended the delegation's refusal to embrace aggressive targets, claiming they were premature, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was in a nearby hotel arguing the opposite. "People everywhere recognize the time for discussion about whether global warming exists has passed," said Bloomberg, who has called for the implementation of a carbon tax. "Now it's time for action."

And Bloomberg could point to the fact that over 700 U.S. cities have signed up to meet Kyoto Protocol-style carbon cuts, while California has mandated a 25% reduction in greenhouse gases by 2020. "People here are acutely aware of what's happening in the U.S. beyond the Bush Administration, and they take great heart in the growing momentum," says Eliot Diringer, director of international strategies for the Pew Center on Climate Change.

Sen. John Kerry came in person to Bali to deliver that message, meeting with foreign delegations, his rhetoric backed by the recent passage by the Senate Environment Committee of the Warner-Lieberman Climate Bill, which calls for 15% emission reductions by 2020. "I wanted to make certain that those folks who are involved in the negotiations understand that they are not alone in dealing with this," says Kerry. "The Administration is isolated in its own country." Kerry, Maine Republican Senator Olympia Snowe and 50 other members of Congress sent a protest letter Wednesday to President Bush calling for U.S. negotiators to drop their opposition to emission targets.

Despite the moral support they lend to those pushing the U.S. to accept stronger action, Gore, Kerry and the rest of the shadow U.S. delegation are ultimately powerless to affect the outcome at Bali - the fate of the negotiations remains in the hands of President Bush and his negotiators. Toward the end of his speech Gore, with his customary taste for the eccentric analogy, invoked the hockey player Bobby Hull, who Gore said was skilled because he sent the puck, not where his teammates were, but where they would be. "You have to look to where we're going to be," Gore urged the Bali delegates. The problem with that advice for the Bali delegates, however, is that Gore is not the President.
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Original story

We're probably still screwed, but it's heartening to see that the majority of Americans who disagree with the shrub are standing up and being heard. We've come along way from the post 9-11 national psychoses, but it's sad to see that it has taken this long and that there is no real chance of justice for those who have damaged the country.

E.E.L. Ambiense · 13 Dec 2007

Cthippo said: ↑

Original story

We're probably still screwed, but it's heartening to see that the majority of Americans who disagree with the shrub are standing up and being heard. We've come along way from the post 9-11 national psychoses, but it's sad to see that it has taken this long and that there is no real chance of justice for those who have damaged the country.
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You're right, definitely. I like to think we still have at least some of our rights as citizens of this fair country, whether we actually do or not, and being able to stand up and complain about something without being either shot or tackled and jailed until whatever it was we were speaking out against is past or completed.

You mention the post-9/11 psychosis; I can honestly say I personally never fell into that blind goose stepping miasma (at least in the deep south here..) about the 'necessity' of flying a little flag on your antenna, slapping that bumper-sticker on the vehicle with the large "W '04" on it, going to church or unquestionably supporting the presidential administration's actions, choices or policies regardless of how utterly destructive and ridiculous they were/are. I've been called many things under the sun because of it. And I'm amazed it's taken this long for a large chunk of the fellow American brethren to realize we have yet another filthy politician making our decisions for us without our true permission to do so. But I digress. I'm merely speaking from the heart. As black and 'Un-American' that it is.

Cthippo · 14 Dec 2007

I had an additional thought while reading about the (non-)progress in Bali. I wonder if we're not creating the next generation of terrorists intent on attacking the US in retribution for our climate policies. At this point, especially here, it seems like a stretch, but as the effects of climate change become more painful, especially in poorer countries, there is likley to be a backlash against those who are percieved to be the cause of that pain. How much of this anger is justified is very debatible, but as always in human endeavour perception defines reality.

Hypothetical case in point. When the next massive typhoon kills 20,000 people in southeast Asia , in areas already compromised by rising sea levels, it desn's seem like much of a stretch for the survivors to blame the country which is fighting progress on climate change. From our perspective sitting here safe in the developed world it's a very tenious connection between our actions (or that of our government) and a storm on the other side of the world, but to someone who has just lost their home or family or village to a storm the likes of which have never been seen before in that area, it doesn't seem much of a stretch to blame the rich Americans.

In talking about terrorism the perpetrators are always described as "fanatics", but what is seldom mentioned is the conditions that bring a person to feel that dying to either improve the lot of their people or to inflict retribution for percieved injustice. Terrorism is a tactic by which the powerless seek to either influence the powerful or else to strike back at them. It seems likley to me that global warming and official US indifference to it is likley to create anger amongst the powerless who are going to suffer the worst effects of it and that those people are likley to seek to retialiate any way they can.

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Is America the Villain in Bali?

Cthippo Can't mod my way out of a paper bag

E.E.L. Ambiense Acrylic Heretic

Cthippo Can't mod my way out of a paper bag

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Is America the Villain in Bali?

Cthippo Can't mod my way out of a paper bag

E.E.L. Ambiense Acrylic Heretic

Cthippo Can't mod my way out of a paper bag

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