Thursday, October 06, 2005
Bush and Howard put climate change on back-burner
When Messers Bush and Blair were first egging each other to go into Iraq nearly 4 years ago, as a concession to the lesser nations of the world the US said it would finally get Israel serious about upholding the numerous Security Council resolutions held against it.

Bush outlined his plan as a ‘road-map’ to peace – essentially a series of confidence building measures, eventually leading to negotiations towards a two-state model for Palestine-Israel.

Of course it was a sop, and no sooner had the Coalition of America charged through Iraq than the ‘Road Map’ (now capitalised) was allowed to fade into the background and Israel and Palestine could continue deliberations at their own snail’s pace. America had secured its immediate foreign policy goals – it had mostly neutralised opposition to the war and Israel could continue the occupation on its own terms, not the UN’s.

It is now with a strange sense of deja-vu that I read that the US and Australia are now slowly withdrawing their enthusiasm for the Asia-Pacific Climate Pact.

The climate pact was the US’s and Australia’s answer to their climate change dilemma: a non-binding, coal and technology-based fix for global warming, which allows their state-subsidised hydrocarbon energy industry to continue business-as-usual. At the same time, it would even enable their high value added sector to sell technology to Asia to prevent those nations becoming the high polluters we already are.

The pact served its purpose – it bought the two biggest global polluters a little bit of credibility at a crucial time. The G8 leaders were meeting, the Kyoto Protocol was coming into force and Kyoto’s successor’s terms of reference were being negotiated. Bush and Howard could now look like they were doing something.

Officially, the inaugural meeting of the climate pact, due to take place in Adelaide in November, has merely been ‘postponed’, but observers note that not one jot of work has been completed towards getting any pact up and running. The new date of January has only been unofficially put forward and has not been confirmed by the Howard government.

A cooling of support for this half-baked pact was expected. But perhaps more worrying is the rumour that Tony Blair – in the past a keen advocate of UN enforced emissions reduction targets - is himself cooling on the idea of a Kyoto successor. Instead he has signalled he is more supportive of such a technology-based, voluntary system as that floated and subsequently forgotten by the US, Australia, China and Japan.

Blair’s apparent championing of voluntary achievement seem ironic, given that his administration has been obsessive in driving performance-related standards regimes throughout the public sector. You worry that if Blair is turned, Kyoto will whither away.

See also:

• Brisbane doesn't quite qualify
• Are these people the first global warming refugees?
• Always a talking point
• Show your colours, Bob
• Renegades will undermine Kyoto process

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