Bowing to Big Oil
Bush axes Kyoto environmental accords
By Deirdre
Griswold
George W. Bush is on a collision course with the
environmental movement around the world. The president's
announcements that he will oppose regulating greenhouse gas
emissions and that he will support oil drilling in the fragile
wildlife preserves of arctic Alaska have elicited condemnation
from all and cries of betrayal from those who had taken his
campaign promises for good coin.
Bush's long relationship with the giant oil conglomerates
preordained these moves. As former Secretary of Labor Robert
Reich said in an op-ed column in the New York Times of March
18, "It's payback time, and every industry and trade
association is busily cashing in." The oil giants own many of
the coal companies and utilities that burn coal to produce
power, emitting vast amounts of carbon dioxide gas in the
process.
This move means that "the polluters are in control of the
White House," said Anna Aurilio, legislative director for the
U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
Of course, Bush didn't say anything about paying back the
corporate sponsors who had donated heavily to his campaign. A
letter to four Congress members that laid out his stance
instead blamed the switch on "high energy prices" and claimed
there was an "incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the
causes of, and solutions to, global climate change."
Bush is being less than honest. He and the corporate groups
leaning on him--like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National
Association of Manufacturers, and the deceptively named Global
Climate Coalition--must know that a team of British scientists
has found absolute proof of the greenhouse gas theory.
New satellite proof
of greenhouse effect
Up until now, projections of global warming caused by a
human-produced layer of carbon dioxide blanketing the Earth
have been based on computer simulations. Now a comparison of
satellite observations taken 27 years apart has proven the
existence of increased CO2 in the atmosphere.
Calling their work "the first experimental observation
of changes in the Earth's outgoing long-wave radiation
spectrum, and therefore the greenhouse effect," team leader
John Harries said, "We're absolutely sure, there's no
ambiguity. What we are seeing can only be due to the increase
in the gases." Harries was president of Britain's Royal
Meteorological Society from 1996 to 1997.
This study, reported in the science journal Nature,
merely proves again what scientists have agreed on for some
time now. Changes in climate have become so unmistakable that
the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has
predicted a dramatic rise in the Earth's temperature by the end
of this century.
The evidence was already so strong in 1997 that the
U.S. government signed the Kyoto Accord, which agreed that
global warming was a grave problem. The accord committed its
signers, particularly the industrialized countries, to reducing
greenhouse gas emissions to the 1990 level by the year
2007.
Given the threat, this is a modest goal. But Bush's
announcement was a death knell for Kyoto. The U.S., with 4
percent of the world's population, creates 25 percent of the
greenhouse gases. There can be no meaningful international
agreement without U.S. participation.
Bush's turnabout from his campaign promises was so
abrupt that it caught the head of the Environmental Protection
Agency, Christine Todd Whitman, by sur prise. She had just been
in Europe assuring the environment ministers of the G-7
countries that the new U.S. administration supported a limit on
greenhouse gases.
True to her own conservative, big business-friendly
political history, however, Whitman quickly adapted to the new
administration line.
Climatologists predict floods, drought for
U.S.
While this little political charade was being acted
out, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was
predicting damaging floods and drought in vast sections of the
U.S. this spring. Deep snow pack and heavy rains are likely to
cause flooding in sections of the Northeast and Central states,
while water shortages are expected to continue in the Northwest
and Florida.
The drought in the Northwest has contributed to
California's power crisis, although the power companies have
exaggerated the crisis to push up prices. Bush then uses the
excuse of these high-energy prices to ax the Kyoto Accord. But
global warming will only increase the freaky weather conditions
that are leading to drought and floods.
A report by the group Redefining Progress has found
that the communities most affected by climate change will be
low-income, especially with people of color. Ansje Miller, the
group's manager for environmental justice, said Bush's decision
"will have serious detrimental effects on the lives of millions
of people in this country."
It is already a life-and-death issue for low-lying
countries around the world like Bangladesh, Mozambique and
island nations in the Caribbean and South Pacific.
Germany has hydrogen-fueled car
Meanwhile, breakthroughs in technology already offer
ways to avert global warming. The German auto manufacturer BMW
has produced a car that runs on hydrogen instead of gasoline
and produces no air pollution of any kind--no particles and no
carbon dioxide.
This prototype can cruise over 200 miles at speeds
above 100 miles an hour on a tank of hydrogen and can be
refueled in four minutes. Engineers say it is as safe as a
gasoline engine. The technology could also be adapted for power
generation. European Ford, based in Germany, has also unveiled
a hydrogen-fueld car.
Why were these German companies the ones to make this
breakthrough, and not Ford or General Motors in the
U.S.?
Germany has no oil.
U.S. capitalists, on the other hand, have a lock on
most of the world's oil production and profits. The entire
architecture of U.S. policy in the Middle East, including more
than five decades of building up Israel as a regional military
power at the expense of the Palestinians and other Arab people,
rests on the central role of oil to U.S. big business. George
Bush senior and the Pentagon showed their commitment to the oil
companies when they launched the Gulf War against
Iraq.
But the Democrats, too, do the bidding of big business
even if they speak in somewhat more popular language. While
Bill Clinton signed the Kyoto Accord, his administration did
nothing to implement it. And his policy toward Iraq and Israel
varied little from that of the Republicans.
This is what has to be grasped by those
environmentalists who have spent years trying to reason with
the U.S. capitalist class, demonstrating to them the great
dangers of global warming, and now are aghast at what is
happening under the Bush administration. The problem is not
that this president is a dodo. It is that the whole political
machinery that produced Bush is tied irrevocably to the
billionaire ruling class. And they are not in the mood to agree
to a gigantic retooling of industry--especially not when a
worldwide capitalist recession is looming.
Their concern is with undercutting imperialist
rivals--like Germany--by taking advantage of their weaknesses.
They will play their oil card as long as it is trump.
The degradation of the planet is yet one more urgent
reason--in addition to all the miseries inflicted on the
workers and the oppressed nations--why everyone has a stake in
building a fighting movement to liberate society from
capitalist ownership and control.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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