WTF? US Changes Course In Bali On Environment — Or Has It?

By Sunday December 16, 2007

I wonder what’s really going on here. Just like that, America, that bastion of denial about global warming or doing anything about it, has made a u-turn and is now repudiating the stand it’s taken for years by “join[ing] the consensus”?

Late-night drama pushes US into climate deal
Amid extraordinary and emotional scenes, which at one point saw the American delegation booed at the UN climate change conference, ministers from more 180 countries thrashed out agreement after days of wrangling.

The resulting ‘Bali roadmap’ is a global warming pact that starts a two-year process of negotiations designed to agree a new set of emissions targets to replace those in the Kyoto protocol.

But the road was extremely rocky. Talks stalled as Paula Dobriansky, head of the US delegation, signalled that America opposed calls from poorer countries for technological and financial help to combat climate change. It seemed any agreement was doomed. Then Papua New Guinea took to the floor and, in a highly charged speech, its delegate challenged the US: ‘If you’re not willing to lead, get out of the way.’

Minutes later, in an astonishing reversal, Dobriansky returned to announce, to cheers from the hall: ‘We will go forward and join the consensus.’

Ah…. Of course! It’s all just a ploy to make it seem in election times that a Republican leadership is doing something while in reality it’s setting the whole thing up for a weak result if not outright failure during the next two years. Or am I being too cynical?

Christian Aid said it was ‘dismayed’ by the compromises. ‘We were expecting a roadmap and we’ve got one,’ said Nelson Muffuh, the charity’s senior climate change policy analyst. ‘But it lacks signposts and there is no agreed destination.’

In other climate-related news, here’s a look at geo-engineering which hopes to radically modify the world climate by simulating massive volcanic eruptions.


7 Comments
  1. moss says:
    12/16/2007 at 6:51 am

    1. Every response from the US delegation had to be cleared through the White House; so, no aberration. Why the public “change”?

    2. The Bush League is attempting to change public opinion of their foot-dragging on behalf of the Oil Patch Boyz – before the 2008 elections. They have their own pet conference of sorts coming up – threatened with a boycott for their intransigence.

    3. The plot in Bali always premised a 2-year span before finalizing anything as daring as conservation targets. That gets the political process beyond the 2008 elections, as well.

    Expedience overrules the usual lies.

  2. Dallas says:
    12/16/2007 at 8:49 am

    This is Bush trying to obscure his legacy of war, treasonous plundering of the treasury, national disgrace abroad and his mental disability.

    He’s now trying to shoehorn in:
    > concern for environment
    > a quick and dirty middle east peace pact
    > concern for “Burma” (like if the ass knew where Burma was and now called something else)
    > taking speech lessons (too late A-hole)
    > the War is congress’s fault

  3. poetryman69 says:
    12/16/2007 at 11:57 am

    I came across and interesting idea. Future news. Here is my attempt:

    China shocks the world by revealing the first completely pollution free coal fired power plants are supplying energy to the Olympics. Every gram of carbon the plants produced is trapped and recycled.

    In further news it is announced that you may save the environment by getting drunk. Distilled spirits manufacturers finally realized that they could trap and recycle CO2 produced by sour mash fermentation by adding just a little extra plumbing.

    And finally, one of the largest sources of waste paper was eliminated as phone books the world over went on an “opt in” system. After it was realized that many people who communicate via cell phone and internet never even open a phone book, it was easy to cut the number of phone books produced in the world by 90%.

    

  4. Anonymous says:
    12/16/2007 at 12:00 pm

    #1 Lies? The IPCC is all about lies and spin.

    http://tinyurl.com/2q89pf

  5. jim h says:
    12/16/2007 at 12:53 pm

    Who knows who was calling the shots in Bali. The U.S. delegates might have acted on their own, ignoring someone from the White House yelling into the phone. Or Bush’s people might have decided that appearing to go along with this agreement could be a shred of “legacy”.

    Why anyone would accuse the IPCC of “lies and spin” is just incomprehensible. The IPCC reports involved literally thousands of scientists from areound the world. Scientists don’t advance their careers by being wrong in big, public ways.

    Is someone trying to convince me that a secret Al Gore campaign committee has paid off 10,000 scientists? Let’s talk about something more likely, like – maybe OJ Simpson didn’t do it…

  6. MikeN says:
    12/16/2007 at 8:21 pm

    This has been how they’ve acted from day one. Pres. Bush merely publicly announced what everyone knew, that the Senate hadn’t ratified Kyoto, and wasn’t going to.

  7. MikeN says:
    12/17/2007 at 6:36 am

    Between 1997 and 2004, here’s what happened:

    * Emissions worldwide increased 18.0%.
    * Emissions from countries that signed the treaty increased 21.1%.
    * Emissions from non-signers increased 10.0%.
    * Emissions from the U.S. increased 6.6%.

    Updated numbers will be the same, since the US has actually decreased emissions one year.


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