A Hague Sense of Unease
Will the rest of the world bend to U.S. pressure to
weaken Kyoto?
by Bill McKibben
20 Nov 2000
THE HAGUE, Netherlands An hour's
drive from the crowded convention hall
where international negotiators are
toiling to reach some agreement on
fighting climate change, you can visit
one of the enormous storm surge
barriers the Dutch have built to keep the North Sea at
bay. Comprising hundreds of thousands of tons of
concrete and steel, they stand guard at the river mouths
to prevent another hurricane-driven flood like the one in
1953 that claimed 1,800 lives. They are the ultimate
architecture of prevention, erected when the network of
smaller dikes and sea walls and wooden-shoed boys
sticking out their fingers proved too flimsy. "We are
masters of the tide now," said a tour guide proudly as
he led us around. "Not God, but us."
Here in the convention hall, thousands of tired people
from around the world are busy trying to plan something
similar to hold back the rush of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere. The first question is, are they at work
designing a sturdy wall, or are there so many holes in
their blueprint that it will quickly be swamped? And the
second question is, if they agree on a design, will it
ever be built?
What makes the situation especially tricky is that the
better a dam they sketch out, the less likely it is to get
built.
That's because the United States delegation keeps
insisting it can't sell a strong climate change treaty at
home. And to judge by the drift of conversation around
the conference today, the U.S. seems to be winning the
argument. The level of tension is surprisingly low; it's as
if the rest of the world has begun to concede the fight.
Exhibit A in the delegation's drive for a loophole-ridden
treaty is the U.S. Senate, which is of course on record
as opposing a Kyoto-like agreement. American
negotiators insist that even the modest 7 percent cuts it
pledged at Kyoto in 1997 will only be ratified by the
Senate if most of the emissions can be gained
painlessly -- not by asking Americans to drive more
efficient cars, say, but by counting our forests as
"carbon sinks" and allowing us to buy cheap emissions
credits abroad.
Fumbling Towards Bethlehem
And U.S. senators are on hand to prove the
delegation's point. Chuck Hagel (R), the Nebraskan
arch-opponent of the Kyoto Protocol, has journeyed
here with a band of like-minded colleagues. They are
more genial than they were three years ago in Japan, in
part because they seem to have accepted a little more
of the science around climate change, in part because
the political equation has shifted some, and mostly
because they're winning the bulk of their battles to
weaken the treaty.
"We are fumbling our way towards finding a world
community in which our sovereignties are held whole,"
Sen. Larry Craig (R - Idaho) said during an afternoon
press briefing on Monday. If George W. Bush becomes
president, added Hagel, "he would be in a position to
lead on the issue of getting our arms around
greenhouse gas emissions." Though neither said they
thought a treaty emerging from this conclave would be
ratifiable, Craig said a Bush administration should not
send it to the Senate for a "slam dunk rejection,"
adding, "I believe we ought to stay engaged with the
rest of the world on this because science is starting to
tell us we have a problem."
An incredulous journalist at the press hearing, who
identified himself as a member of the Wall Street
Journal editorial board, rose to defend the true faith.
"Given that the science is still uncertain," he huffed, how
could the senators be backing away from a pure
rejectionist stance? Craig responded that five years
ago he would have agreed. "But I think there is now a
coalescing of the science."
Language like that leads some in the environmental
community to think they might have a prayer of Senate
ratification, albeit some time in the distance after the
Europeans and Japanese go first and a deal is
brokered with the Chinese and the Indians to bring
them into the process. Environmentalists are unwilling
to surrender the Kyoto process. In the words of
Environmental Defense senior scientist Michael
Oppenheimer, "It might take 10 years to get some kind
of process started again."
And with that as the context, many American
environmentalists and international scientists seem
willing to go along with loopholes they admit are way
too broad, simply to get the process underway. Robert
Watson, the head of the U.N.-sponsored scientific
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said in a
briefing today that he thought scientists could work out
a method to measure changes in the amount of carbon
that forests were storing, allowing those "sinks" to be
included in the treaty. And other American campaigners
were touting plans to pay farmers for changing tillage
practices, less because they believed it would really
sequester much carbon than because they thought it
might bring crucial farm-state senators on board any
Kyoto coalition. Sens. Hagel and Craig both brightened
at the thought of subsidies for farmers, and for what
Craig called "active forest management" to prevent
carbon-spewing forest fires.
At bottom, environmentalists like Oppenheimer are
banking on the thought that once some kind of treaty is
finally approved and business and government begin to
make even the most modest attempts to implement it,
they'll find the going easier than they expected. "Energy
use is already going up much more slowly than
economic growth. With the barest of incentives, we
could push energy use way down," Oppenheimer
predicts. And he better be right, because the incentives
that will emerge from this week's negotiations will be
bare at best.
Head-in-the-Sand Barbie
So bare that other environmentalists are pushing hard
to toughen the treaty. One group of activists calling
themselves Rising Tide, whose members were
squatting in a nearby building, were denied admission
to the conference venue for "security reasons" even
though they'd been accredited. Some 225 American
students, organized by Greenpeace and staying in a
jam-packed, festive youth hostel across town, managed
to get inside the hall, where they held a massive press
conference, greeted arriving delegates with handouts
calling for closing loopholes, and managed to elude
security guards long enough to hand Hagel a Barbie
doll upside down in a bucket of soil: "the
head-in-the-sand award."
It's not clear, however, how much support the enviros
enjoy with the European negotiators -- who may, after
this fall's fuel-price protests, find themselves thinking a
little more like American politicians.
In the end, almost no one here is arguing for a massive
dam to hold back climate change. Build that and the
U.S. simply won't participate. Instead, we're talking
about a few rocks tossed in the ocean. Perhaps, say
the optimists, once the process begins it will pick up
momentum, and pretty soon everyone will be chucking
in boulders.
Inside this vast hall, caught up in the self-reinforcing
logic of 10,000 people determined to reach some kind
of agreement, it's difficult to gauge just how much
wishful thinking that represents.
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