Virtually the first official act of George W. Bush in his first term in the White House was to trash the presentation to Congress of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. Few doubted that the abandonment of the work of his Democrat predecessor Bill Clinton was in response to the dictates of his Republic Party paymasters in the influential oil and gas and power industries. The United States has thus remained by far the largest generator of greenhouse gases.
Bush, however, has always argued that the scientific case for human industrial activity being the primary cause of climate change has never been properly made. The economic costs of a clampdown on US companies creating greenhouse gases would be too great to risk for an unproven benefit. On the face of it, this may be a reasonable enough argument. But now it has been revealed that the White House was doctoring reports from its own scientists in order to tone down evidence that pointed strongly to the fact that green house gases really are contributing to climate change, whatever other factors might also have been in play. It has also emerged that the leading US oil company, ExxonMobil, was involved in helping the Bush White House formulate its anti-Kyoto policy — something which the oil company has always denied doing.
This demonstration of how the profit motive alone can be used to define right and wrong is deeply depressing even if it is hardly unexpected. The White House has been slow to comment on the reports that it fixed the evidence in favor of rejecting Kyoto. A similar silence followed revelations that the Bush administration’s information on Iraq’s WMD was falsified. Ironically the revelations about climate change evidence came as Bush’s devoted accomplice in the Iraqi WMD story, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, was in Washington, desperately trying to persuade Bush to change his stance on Kyoto. The British have always supported the protocol and as they take over the chairmanship of the G-8, they want the Americans to come on board as well. Blair, however, is in a perfect position to know what will happen next because he went through the same process himself regarding Iraqi WMD. First of all Bush will insist that he had no part whatsoever in any exercise to fix the evidence. Later he will say that even if he had been mislead by inaccurate information, the fact remains that the cost of acting upon it would have been too great and Kyoto simply had to be defeated because implementing it would have been too dangerous to the world economy.
Tony Blair, on the other hand, seems to have the right idea this time. He is saying that regardless of the arguments, the risk of doing nothing is itself too great. With the Russian ratification last year, the Kyoto Protocol which has actually been criticized by experts as only scratching the surface, is now operative. Other economies are shouldering the cost of implementation. Why can’t the world’s wealthiest country drop all its cobbled-together excuses and disinformation and do the same?
