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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the July 3, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Editorial: U.S. and global warming

It should come as no surprise that at the Denver summit the United States government refused to commit itself to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Still, it's shocking. The gall. The arrogance. Leave it to the leading imperialist government to flout worldwide sentiment, which is uniformly for cleaning up the environment and saving the planet. For U.S. imperialism this is not a priority, because it would cut into corporate profits.

President Bill Clinton lectured and bullied his way through the Denver weekend on all topics, from NATO to the Middle East. But it was on the question of whether to clean up the environment that he really shone in his assignment of representing U.S. big business.

No, Clinton said. We simply will not commit ourselves to any specific measures to cut greenhouse gases. Sure, he said. We promise to make "substantial reductions." We'll determine what "substantial" means. See you in six months, when we discuss it all again in Kyoto, Japan.

According to reports in the press, the leaders of the other imperialist governments, especially French President Jacques Chirac, were furious at Clinton. The European Union has already agreed to cut emissions of greenhouse gases to 15 percent of 1990 levels by 2010. Now European industry is at a disadvantage, forced to take expensive measures to cut pollution while U.S. corporations have no such brake on their profits.

Inside the United States, in fact, corporate pollution is on the rise under new policies the Clinton administration has quietly implemented. Polluters can buy exemptions from pollution standards. They can buy the "right" to pollute in excess of the legal limit. It's no wonder Clinton wasn't having any of this international-standards stuff. He and his big-business backers have a good thing going at home. And this from the team of Clinton and Gore, who campaigned as friends of the environment.

Of course, the worst excesses are not only on the soil of Europe or the United States or Japan. Companies based in the imperialist countries are despoiling the Third World at a rapid pace. From clearing rain forests to spewing toxic sludge, imperialism's search for new markets and cheap labor is poison. This is the system for which Clinton stood firm in Denver.

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