Bush Climate Plan A "Half-Hearted Response"

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When the US Senate recently passed a bill on greenhouse gas emissions, its sponsors hailed a shift in attitude to the world's most critical environmental issue, "from whether we should do something to what we intend to do". The Bush Administration had indicated last September, in a report to Congress, that it might be ready to accept that the emission of greenhouse gases was "the largest single forcing agent of climate change". But this week President George Bush won a five-year fight to persuade Congress to pass an energy bill that gives huge subsidies to the gas and oil industries.

Further evidence this week that the climate change battle is far from won involves Australia, the only ally of the US among developed nations in rejecting the Kyoto Protocol's mandatory regime to reduce emissions. The gap between rhetoric and binding commitments to action is still vast. Environment Minister Ian Campbell concedes that the weight of scientific evidence amounts to a wake-up call. Releasing a Government-commissioned report by the Australian Greenhouse Office, he said climate change was a reality. The outlook for Australia makes for bleak reading. The report predicts a hotter climate, more droughts, violent storms, agricultural losses and serious environmental damage in 30 to 50 years - within many of our lifetimes. "I think as a country we're going to need to do more and more," Senator Campbell said.

Yet doing more does not include ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, as the Government made clear this week when it joined a secretly negotiated pact with the US, China, Japan, India and South Korea, which produce 40 per cent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. The pact clearly serves the interests of the world's big fossil-fuel producers and users. As the former head of the Australian Greenhouse Office, Gwen Andrews, said: "One has to wonder whether it is really an effort to tackle the issue or just an attempt to deflect criticism about inaction by taking action in a way that doesn't commit them to any restraints on emissions."

Today The Age reports on the alarming extent to which the fossil fuel and mining industries have dominated national energy policy. While Ms Andrews never once briefed Prime Minister John Howard in her four-year tenure from 1998 to 2002, Mr Howard and Industry Minister Ian McFarlane secretly met senior industry figures a month before last year's release of the energy white paper, which adopted most of their policy suggestions, including non-ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. It is true, as Senator Campbell argues, that Kyoto falls far short of a whole solution (but who had said it is one?). It is imperative, as he says, that developing giants such as China and India, which are not bound by Kyoto targets, be engaged to "ensure massive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions right around the globe". But this is probably wishful thinking while the terms of the pact set no binding targets and rely on improved technology that might help limit fossil-fuel emissions - in a decade or two's time - but, unlike renewable energy, won't cut them to zero.

EDIT

http://www.theage.com.au/news/editorial/halfhearted-climate-change-response/2005/07/29/1122144014879.html?oneclick=true