Taking a short break from the US election’s politics, I decided to concentrate on the environment. This is a global theme which by definition affects us all and yet it has, strangely enough, been quite absent in both the Democrats and the Republicans campaigns. But I said I was going to take a break for that, didn’t I?
Instead I will begin by describing the attitude of the current administration which in almost eight years in power has not contributed much except in a negative way towards solving or ameliorating a problem which threatens the earth: global warming.

Lately the administration has tried hard to appear that they were doing something. Last Wednesday, April 16th, ahead of the gathering of 16 nations in Paris in a round of talks about greenhouse gases, President Bush, in a Rose Garden speech on climate change, challenged the world’s biggest (and most polluting) countries among other things to commit to curbing their greenhouse-gas emissions. He then proceeded to give a speech about goals without giving any specifics on measures and penalties. Bush only said that the U.S. should stop the rise in its emissions by 2025. As he had done through his time in office, he rejected to focus on mandatory limits or emissions. His essentially empty words are really not very different from silence.

Dr. Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of Geosciences and International Affairs at Princeton University, and a leading scholar on global warming said, “U.S. failure to do more than stabilize emissions by 2025 likely means other developed countries won’t do any more than that, and that then ripples through to China’s position.”

Two days later,on Friday the 18, at the Major Economics Meeting (MEM), the talks among the 16 nations which were later described as difficult, tense and lively, took place in Paris. Addressing the negotiators, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, while trying hard not to offend the Americans, warned that warming is threatening food supplies and could create conflicts among starving people around the world. “If we continue in this direction, climate change will encourage migrations of populations who have nothing left toward territory where populations don’t have much, and the Darfur crisis will be just one crisis among dozens of others,” Sarkozy added.

Representatives of other countries were more outspoken in their reaction to Bush’s speech a couple of days before. The South African minister of the environment, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, said “we reject and cannot accept what the United States proposed.” While Sigmar Gabriel, the German minister, was unable to hide his “disappointment.”

Even as The White House cast Mr. Bush’s announcement in the Rose Garden as an ambitious effort by a president on what they called “the climate change issue”, it was clear that in the US and the rest of the world, environmentalists, scientists and lawmakers were not satisfied. They have accused Mr. Bush of trying to derail legislation that would curb emissions even further. His speech in the Rose Garden has been dismissed as being irrelevant. It would be nice when all this circus of the election is finished, whoever becomes president has the determination to attack this problem which will otherwise have severe consequences for generations to come.

Related posts:

1. Climate change talks