EDITORIALS
Climate policy is weak
G-8 summit pays lip service to needs but fails to offer solid pollution plan
President Bush’s final G-8 summit meeting ended the way his first one should have begun, with a pledge by the world’s largest economies to cut their greenhouse gas emissions in half by mid-century and an invitation to the emerging industrial nations to join in that necessary move to guard against potentially catastrophic climate change.
But even the statement that did come out of the summit, after seven wasted years, was so mushy that it is very unlikely to be remembered as the day things changed.
The official statement actually commits no one to anything. It talks about how the world should share a vision of working out a way to parcel out responsibility for a global cut of 50 percent in greenhouse emissions by 2050. No baselines, timetables or benchmarks. No way to measure success or failure. No stepping up and accepting responsibility.
It’s lip service out of both sides of the leaders’ mouths.
The final statement of the summit allows the leaders, Bush among them, to claim they are standing up to their responsibility as global leaders to deal with a global problem. It also allows them to answer claims among their own constituencies that they should bring along the nations that didn’t make the initial mess, but are quickly becoming major contributors to the problem.
But some of those other nations — China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa — issued a defiant statement of their own. They reasonably argued that it was unfair to expect them to slash their own 21st century emissions just as their industrial structures are ramping up to 20th century levels. At the very least, they note, they shouldn’t be expected to meet such goals without significant help — cash and technology— from the G-8.
What the world really needs on this issue is strong leadership. And only the United States is in a real position to provide that leadership. Once we have a leader who is ready, willing and able.
Bush’s seven-year journey from climate change denier and global obstructionist to mouther of climate platitudes was politely considered to be great progress, and allowed the president to finish out his run of G-8s as something other than the skunk at the garden party.
It does no good simply to complain that other countries are just as dirty as we are, or that they will become so if they don’t change their ways — even though they are, or they will be.
It should be the highest priority for the next president of the United States to rise to the world’s great need and stop daring the other nations to go first. On this matter, like others, the United States is the indispensable nation. What we do, or fail to do, matters most.
