The Age of Global Warming: A History (23 page)

16

President Bush Goes to Rio

The time of the finite world has come.

UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros Ghali, 3
rd
June 1992

I did not come here to apologise.

President Bush addressing the Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro on 12
th
June 1992

Having agreed that the president could sign the convention, the next question was whether he should go to Rio. If anything this debate provoked even more discussion than the convention itself. The White House was split down the middle. Darman was the most vocal opponent, but the president wanted to go, even if it had a political cost back home. After finding out that virtually all the leaders of important countries were going, Bush felt he should be there.
[1]
 

There was a logistical consequence of the lateness of President Bush’s decision to attend. The White House staff and press corps were booked into the VIP’s Motel, one of Rio’s famed guesthouses, offering comfort, privacy and an impressive array of mirrors.
[2]

Because of his relationships with fellow environment ministers, the White House decided that Reilly should lead the American delegation to Rio. The caveat was that he would not make any binding agreements without first clearing them with Yeutter. According to Yeutter, Reilly did a splendid job.
[3]
Reilly continued to press his agenda, but as a team player. Even after agreement of the compromise text on the climate change convention, Reilly kept up the pressure for targets and timetables.

In early June, he arranged for Gro Harlem Brundtland to be seated next to the president at a dinner to press the case. The next day, Bush called Reilly from his running machine. Could he provide the president with a memo on whaling? At the dinner, the chairman of the Brundtland Commission had spent two hours lobbying the president on the need for ‘scientific’ whaling.
[4]

Publicly, Brundtland had a different message. Speaking on the White House driveway, she expressed her disappointment at American unwillingness to sign the biodiversity convention. ‘I believe you can combine environmental concern with an increase in jobs,’ although she didn’t specifically mention those of Norwegian whalers.
[5]

Splits within the Bush administration and its differences with the rest of world served to shift the spotlight from splits between other nations. Europe’s environment commissioner Carlo Ripa di Meana threatened to boycott the summit after failing to secure support for a European carbon tax and to express his disgust at the compromise with the US. It meant that Europe was being forced to accept a treaty with lower standards than it was adopting for its own members.
[6]

There were also splits among the nations of the South. Saudi Arabia wanted forests to be seen as carbon sinks that remove carbon dioxide. Malaysia argued that the industrial countries had caused the climate problem, so should reduce their emissions rather than trying to solve the problem by locking up forests in the developing world.
[7]

Once he got to Rio, Reilly met Goldemberg to explore possible changes to the biodiversity convention that would enable Bush to sign it. Reilly cabled Yeutter his suggestions. Shortly after, while being interviewed on live television, Reilly was handed a copy of the cable that had been leaked to the
New York Times
. He abruptly ended the interview. ‘I was personally embarrassed just to be handed the goddamn thing,’ he said later.
[8]

The leak had a devastating impact on the administration’s ability to contain what anyway was going to be a difficult situation. Two days later, an exasperated Bush told a joint press conference with the British prime minister, ‘I’d like to find the leaker, and I’d liked to see the leaker filed – fired.’ Once found, the culprit would be ‘gainfully unemployed’.
[9]
All this was greeted with glee by Democrats in Rio. Al Gore, leading the Senate delegation to the conference, said it had set off a firestorm of criticism. ‘Once again, the president has overruled his EPA chief. This time, the whole world is watching.’ Reilly countered that his resignation was not on the cards, ‘I do not want to give that satisfaction to my enemies.’
[10]

Up till then, Gore had been more measured than some of his colleagues. Senator Wirth called America’s position a disgrace. ‘Instead of a commie under every bed, it’s now an eco-terrorist behind every tree.’
[11]
Jerry Brown, the once and future governor of California, accused the president of being in the pocket of special interests. Greed and corruption would always win the day.
[12]
To applause from an audience of mostly American environmentalists, Brown added, ‘Bush and the administration’s position on the environment are completely crackpot.’
[13]
This kind of attack on foreign soil was too much even for Wirth. ‘Our side is getting hammered,’ he complained. ‘It’s the complete inability of the White House to explain what the US has been doing the last twenty years.’
[14]

The
Washington Post
described the US as virtually under siege at the conference.
[15]
The Bush team’s headaches didn’t come from the Third World. Collor had been as good as his word. True, Fidel Castro received the loudest ovation with his claim that consumer societies were fundamentally responsible for environmental destruction, but at least kept to the allotted five minutes speaking time.
[16]
Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands launched an initiative to get like-minded countries to sign up to the targets that had been taken out of the climate change convention. The administration made a clumsy counter-attack. ‘They treated us like we are some kind of colony,’ an Austrian diplomat complained, while a Swiss diplomat said the US was ‘shooting sparrows with a cannon’.
[17]

Soon the sparrows were joined by a German eagle. No American ally had benefited more from the Bush administration than Germany. Now it was payback time. Going back on the agreement between Bush and Kohl, Klaus Töpfer said Germany would seek to have all members of the EC sign a separate declaration at Rio reinstating specific emissions targets. Zoellick, who had joined Reilly in Rio, counter-briefed that Germany and Japan were engaged in a guilt-induced attempt to be politically correct. ‘All this chaos … the circus and the rhetoric’ at the summit were laid at the door of ‘the guilty developed-world logic’ in which the wealthiest feel they ‘owe the rest of the world.’
[18]

American difficulties didn’t restrain the German government from playing its ace. It announced that it would cut its carbon dioxide emissions by between twenty-five to thirty per cent by 2005.
[19]
On 1
st
July 1990, the economies of the two Germanys were unified. Soon after, the economy of the former East Germany went into a deep slump. Industrial production fell by more than half and heavily polluting power stations were closed. Reunification enabled Germany to proclaim its virtuousness at Rio and Germany’s emissions fell by nearly eighteen per cent between 1990 and 2005, the steepest achieved by any advanced economy.
[20]
At a conservatively estimated cost of DM750 billion ($523 billion) for the first five years, viewed as a policy to cut carbon emissions, reunification is the world’s most costly global warming policy to date – equivalent to more than twenty per cent of Germany’s 1995 Gross Domestic Product.

President Bush spent as little time at Rio as he decently could. He gave a speech, signed the climate change convention, and had his photo taken with the one hundred and seven other world leaders at the summit. Bush also had a private meeting with the ecologist and film maker Jacques Cousteau, who had given a lecture claiming that population growth would lead to a world where people could only survive like rats. ‘Even if we found a way to feed this human tidal wave, it would be impossible to provide this multitude with decent living conditions,’ Cousteau told an audience that included Collor and the King and Queen of Sweden.
[21]

In reality, the summit was part ceremonial and part soap box, its substantive business having been concluded beforehand. The docking of a replica Viking ship, the Gaia, marked the opening of the Global Forum, an alternative summit for NGOs. Not everybody welcomed the Vikings. ‘Go home Gaia. $5 million rich men show off,’ said one banner.
[22]
Compared to the four hundred or so NGOs at Stockholm’s Hog Farm, the number of NGOs accredited at Rio was some one thousand four hundred and fifty.
[23]
James Bond actor Roger Moore, who had been chased around the Sugarloaf by Richard Kiel’s Jaws in
Moonraker
, proclaimed 3
rd
June to be ‘the first day of the rest of the world’ and Gro Harlem Brundtland argued that whales could be hunted if it was done on a sustainable basis.
[24]

Four days later, the Beach Boys were doing a gig and pledging their support for the Global Forum. Its sound system had been turned off after failing to pay its electricity bills and run up a $2 million deficit amid allegations of corruption. In another part of Rio, tenor Plácido Domingo was singing for the great and the good and those who could pay $100.
[25]
The Rio Refuse Collection Authority complained that people were ignoring recycling signs on the one hundred and sixty special bins placed throughout the conference centre. ‘I wouldn’t trust him to save the planet,’ grumbled one refuse collector as an Australian ecologist threw a large piece of pizza into a bin for recyclable material.
[26]

Writing in the
New York Times
on the conference’s first day, Czechoslovakia’s president Vaclav Havel argued that two years after the collapse of Communism, a new polarization was developing, this time between the rich countries of the North and the poor ones of the South. ‘The states of the South find it difficult to overcome their mistrust of the North,’ Havel wrote.

They believe that the northern countries should finally understand that today’s patterns of production and consumption, besides not being sustainable, are the principal cause of the threat facing the global eco-system, and that the northern states therefore have to accept substantial blame for environmental degradation in the poorer countries.
[27]

On the conference’s fourth day, Greenpeace and three other NGOs organised a press conference at Rocinha, home to a quarter of a million of Rio’s poorest people.  The assistant editor of the British Medical Journal, Fiona Godlee, went with them. At a school, the NGOs outlined their plans to save the summit and the planet, with demands for legally binding cuts in greenhouse gas emissions and a reduction in the standard of living of the North.

Sabarina Uega, who ran the Rocinha residents’ association, guided the visitors around over heaps of rubbish and open drains and answered journalists’ questions. What did the people of Rocinha want? Lack of clean water and decent sanitation was the biggest problem. Many children died; perhaps as many as one in five before the age of one. What did Sabarina think of all the money that had been spent on prettifying Rio for the conference? She smiled. ‘Just because we are poor it doesn’t mean we don’t want the city to be beautiful.’
[28]

Opposition from Third World countries meant the proposed convention on forests became a statement of principles. Similarly the legal status of the Earth Charter, envisaged by Strong as the keystone of the summit’s architecture, was downgraded to a non-binding ‘Rio Declaration’. Everyone had thought that the charter would be a namby-pamby, platitudinous statement, said Barbara Bramble of the National Wildlife Federation, the largest US environmental group. Instead it turned into a knockdown, drag-out fight between North and South. ‘They took a draft about ecologic philosophy and turned it into economic power politics.’
[29]

The Declaration pronounced a ‘new and equitable global partnership’, in which developed countries acknowledged their responsibility for the pressure their societies placed on the global environment (principle seven). Sustainable development required states to eliminate unsustainable patterns of production and consumption and ‘promote appropriate demographic policies’, in a coy reference to belief in the benefits of population control (principle eight). In the absence of scientific certainty, the precautionary principle should be applied to protect the environment (principle fifteen). Signatories declared themselves in favour of eradicating poverty – ‘an indispensable requirement for sustainable development’ (principle five) – and against war – ‘inherently destructive of sustainable development’ (principle twenty-four). The roles of women, youth, and indigenous people in sustainable development were all highlighted and the rights of oppressed peoples (the Palestinians) to have their environment recognised (principles twenty to twenty-three) asserted.

Without a concrete plan of action, Strong believed the high sounding rhetoric in UN declarations would be just that. The purpose of Agenda Twenty-One was to avoid the Rio Declaration following the same fate.
[30]
‘Humanity stands at a defining moment in history,’ the preamble to Agenda Twenty-One claimed. The world was confronted with a perpetuation of disparities within and between nations; a worsening of poverty, hunger, ill health and the continuing deterioration of ecosystems.
[31]
In reality, the world had already crossed a threshold into an era that saw the largest numbers of people lifted out of poverty in human history, an accomplishment that the doctrine of sustainable development denied was or could ever happen within an internationally liberal economic order. Described by Goldemberg as a naïve attempt by NGOs to reorganise the basis of the world economy, Agenda Twenty-One’s estimated cost of $600 billion a year, $125 billion of which was meant to come from developed countries, ensured its irrelevance.

At the time, climate change was not the all-consuming issue at Rio. Twenty years later, Rio’s importance is defined by it. Without the summit, the convention would not have been brought into being so quickly – just four years after the alarm had been raised in 1988 – and possibly not at all. For European governments, the Convention’s teeth had been pulled with the removal of legally binding targets. Strong expressed extreme disappointment over this, but wrote that the convention marked an historic milestone in the development of international law. ‘It was clear from inception that it would involve some very fundamental changes in industrial civilisation.’
[32]

The convention did not change the basis of industrial civilisation. Its significance lay elsewhere. In Article Two, the international community accepted the central proposition of global warming by committing themselves to stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system.

Rio therefore was a decisive event in the history of global warming. Even though the IPCC in its First Assessment Report two years earlier had returned an open verdict, the science had been settled by environment ministries and diplomats. Thus President Bush’s signing of the convention was more important than the convention’s omission of legally binding targets for emissions reductions. One hundred and ninety-three nations of the world, including the most powerful one, remain formally bound by international treaty to accept the view that man-made global warming is dangerous.