It's a Dirty World

With disbelief I listened to the commentators on NPR. "The Earth Summit is a success!" they crowed. No evidence was given, other than the impressions of various US government negotiators and media pundits. This is what passes for "alternative news" within the mainstream.

The actual outcome of the Earth Summit was much grimmer. It was also much easier to assess if you read the foreign press reports. The summit's goal was to provide the practical means to alleviate poverty around the world without endangering the environment. The hope was to get the world's nations--particularly the US, the European Union, Japan, Russia, and China--to come to an agreement on a plan to deal with specific issues: the Kyoto climate change treaty, boosting the use of renewable and "clean" energy resources, setting targets for sanitation, maintaining the world's fish stocks, and relieving third world debt, among others.

Most NGOs and environmental groups went to Johannesburg expecting the worst. After all, it was George W. Bush's father who sabotaged the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 by gutting an early draft of the Kyoto treaty, refusing to sign the biodiversity convention, and pushing the policy of "voluntary commitments," which has become the new mantra of big business and Western governments who want to resist quotas on greenhouse gases or any environmental standards at all.

What the environmentalists got out of the Earth Summit was even worse than the worst they had expected. They had stupidly assumed that no progress would be made. Instead, the Bush administration engineered a rollback of some environmental standards that had been agreed on at earlier meetings.

A key biodiversity proposal meant to address the extinction of endangered species, which was agreed upon in April, was gutted at the conference. A health agreement that would bring inexpensive medicine to millions of AIDS sufferers in the Third World is still in limbo because the US objected to the proposal's use of the words "human rights" and "women's rights," on the grounds that these words might evoke an endorsement of abortion.

In the trade agreement, the US attempted to insert wording that would subject local and national environmental laws to review by the World Trade Organization. Norway and Switzerland objected strenuously, then the Ethiopian delegate made a passionate speech condemning the wording, which prompted the European Union and other nations to veto it. This left the US isolated, and the attempt to subject environmental laws to WTO review was abandoned. This time. Certainly, the US will bring up this topic again in the future.

A similar dynamic was evident in negotiations over sanitation. The proposal would cut in half the number of people who live without basic sanitation, including clean water, by the year 2015. This would help an estimated 1.2 billion people. Notably, 2 million people die each year from drinking contaminated water, most of them children. The main opposition came from the US, naturally, which has a policy of opposing anything that sets specific targets. As the week passed, more and more nations abandoned the US position; even the big business lobby finally called for the sanitation targets to be approved. Under this pressure, the US caved in. This became the only significant proposal to be approved by the conference. It still remains to be seen if national governments will cough up the money to clean up dirty water or put into action laws that would punish polluters.

Meanwhile, a clause that would set up a solidarity fund to wipe out poverty was not opposed by the US; yet, while other nations--France, Italy, Germany, Japan--announced that they would contribute aid or cancel the debts of Third World countries, the US remained silent.

The other so-called "success" of the summit was the agreement to restore the world's commercial fisheries. It proposes ending subsidies that encourage large commercial fishing companies to plunder the world's fish stocks. But the wording of the agreement is vague, sets no specific quotas, and is deemed by environmentalists to be "too little, too late"--70% of the world's fish stocks are either over-exploited or seriously depleted. The agreement also leaves it up to various national governments to implement change, with no international oversight or enforcement, and no yardstick by which to measure progress.

The final straw was when the US marshaled Japan and the oil-producing nations to block an agreement on the use of renewable energy--solar, wind, and tidal power. There were several proposals on the table. A G8 commission recommended the world bring renewable energy options to one billion people over the next 10 years. A second proposal was made by Latin American countries for the world to increase its use of renewable energy to 10% of its total energy sources by 2010, which would mean quadrupling the current levels. A European Union proposal upped that level to 15%.

Then the US stepped in. "No quotas," our negotiators insisted. The US lobbied OPEC nations, Japan, Australia, Russia, and Canada. The European Union was quickly isolated. When German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder gave a last-ditch speech calling for "concrete objectives and measures," the US added language to the proposal that named nuclear power as a clean, renewable energy source. Then the US blackmailed Schroder, knowing that he'll be standing for re-election in a country that's vehemently anti-nuclear. They told him: either agree to a proposal with no quotas or we'll pass this agreement with the nuclear language included. In the end, a renewable energy proposal was completely abandoned.

It was no wonder, then, that Colin Powell was booed by the delegates when he made his speech defending the US position. In the eyes of the delegates, the US is a rogue nation, able to disembowel the best agreements in a matter of days.

The delegates knew what the media won't tell us here in the US: US citizens are responsible for poverty and global climate change. We use most of the world's resources and produce most of the world's greenhouse gases and waste. We block any initiatives that would change that state of affairs. And, yes, our SUVs are weapons of mass destruction. Yet we blindly stagger around in a fog of auto emissions, asking ourselves: "Why do they hate us so?"

Isn't it obvious?