Sanjay Suri

EDINBURGH, Scotland, Jul 4 2005 (IPS) — U.S. President George W. Bush’s Independence Day remarks on climate change have turned out to be a statement of independence from any global efforts to contain damaging change.

“If this looks like Kyoto, the answer is no,” Bush said in an ITV television interview to be broadcast on the evening of July 4, Independence Day in the United States. “The Kyoto treaty would have wrecked our economy, if I can be blunt.”

In a clear signal that his administration will not consider returning to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, Bush said he hoped other Group of Eight (G8 – United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Japan and Russia) leaders would “move beyond the Kyoto debate.”

“This is absolutely disgraceful, coming particularly at this stage of the game,” Catherine Pearce, climate campaigner for the group Friends of the Earth International, told IPS. “Bush does not even represent a significant majority in his own country.”

Mayors of 166 U.S. cities, including both Republicans and Democrats have signed the U.S. mayors’ climate protection agreement that commits them to “meet or beat the Kyoto targets,” Pearce said. Under the Kyoto agreement, industrialised countries listed in Annex I of the protocol agree to cut emissions by at least 5.2 percent over 1990 levels by the end of the first implementation period 2008-2012.

“The cities include the largest U.S. cities, Los Angeles and New York. The agreement covers 30 million people across 35 states. But Bush is still resistant to change,” she said. “He is kicking the whole issue of climate change into the grass.”

The Kyoto Protocol, signed in the Japanese city in 1997, binds signatory developed nations to curb emissions of greenhouse gas gases, principally carbon dioxide and methane, which are believed to cause global warming and disrupt climate patterns.

Host Britain has made such efforts to contain climate change one of the two priorities at the G8 summit, along with the development of Africa. The leaders of the eight leading industrialised countries will meet at the golf resort Gleneagles in Scotland, July 6-8.

Bush’s firm refusal to honour the Kyoto Protocol, from which he withdrew the U.S. signature in 2001, has been seen as a major obstacle to global efforts to cut emissions and contain climate change.

Environmentalists and leaders of several nations who have signed the Kyoto treaty had hoped that British Prime Minister Tony Blair would use what has often been proclaimed to be a ”special relationship” between Britain and the United States to persuade the U.S. government to return to the agreement. But Bush remains clearly unmoved.

Bush rejected the suggestion that he might owe Blair the Kyoto Protocol as a return for British support to the United States on Iraq. “Tony Blair made decisions on what he thought was best for keeping the peace and winning the war on terror, as I did,” Bush said.

He did however offer some acknowledgement of the need for efforts to contain climate change. “I think you can grow your economy and at the same time do a better job of harnessing greenhouse gases,” he said. The president also acknowledged that human activities that produce carbon emissions were responsible “to some extent” to contributing to climate change.

Bush said development of new technologies was the best way of containing climate change. That position has done little, however, to convince environmentalists about U.S. intentions.

Bush is only committing himself to future technologies, said Pearce. “There is technology available now to make electricity and energy clean and sustainable. If he is talking of hydrogen cars, they are some way off. He is delaying action. In talking of research and development now, he is sitting in a comfort zone he is familiar with; he’s not taking the discussion further.”

Bush’s argument that signing up to the Kyoto Protocol would wreck the U.S. economy is not convincing, Pearce said. “Certainly 166 U.S. mayors don’t thinks so, and the number of countries that have signed up to the Kyoto Protocol don’t think so either.”

Bush is refusing to face up to the fact that in refusing to take action now, “the economy will be hurt much more down the line,” Pearce said. “And business knows that the cost of climate change will be far greater than the cost of acting on climate change now.”