By Marty Logan
MONTREAL, Aug 16 2002 (IPS)

The world’s most powerful nation and one of its most respected moral guides continue to snub an international treaty that has become a symbolic yardstick for sustainable development.

U.S. President-elect George W. Bush quickly repudiated the Kyoto Protocol to combat global warming in 2001 saying it was bad for business.

And after signing the agreement in 1997, long-serving Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien is now holding the international community to ransom for a better deal, saying his businesses will face unfair competition south of the border.

The positions taken by the huge North American neighbours reflect the findings of a report released this week by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). While the United States and Canada moved towards sustainable development at home after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, their actions continue to have a huge impact on the world at large.

‘’The news is pretty bad,” says Jacob Scherr, director of the international programme of the Natural Resources Defence Council in Washington.

Immediately following the Rio Summit there was a flurry of activity in the United States, he says, including the creation of the President’s Council on Sustainable Development.

But today, ‘’the phrase doesn’t have a lot of currency here. Most people probably don’t know what it means”, says Scherr.

‘’What has been very sad is the failure of national governments to make significant steps” to implement the Rio agenda, he adds.

Industrial pollution and the over-consumption of resources are growing obstacles to sustainable development in the United States, according to Scherr.

Consumers in the United States and Canada use nine times more gasoline than other people in the world do, revealed the UNEP study. With only five percent of the world’s population, the countries generate more than 25 percent of global emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases responsible for the global warming that Kyoto was designed to fix.

U.S. emissions of all greenhouse gases will increase 43 percent by 2020, says a study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, released earlier this year. Bush has shrugged off that report.

A Canadian activist says her country has utterly failed to implement sustainable development. Elizabeth May’s Sierra Club of Canada has issued a Rio Report Card of Canadian governments since 1993. It reveals no star pupils.

‘’Certainly if there’s been any progress at all in the last 10 years it has happened at the level of municipalities,” May says. ‘’We have municipalities in Canada that now have bylaws against the use of pesticides for cosmetic purposes and a number have moved aggressively to remove greenhouse gases.”

‘’These steps are welcome because they provide demonstrations that it’s possible, but overall, we’re in very desperate straits.”

One bright spot, she says surprisingly, is that Chretien remains committed to Kyoto, although it is unlikely that he will announce Canada’s ratification at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, which begins Aug 26.

The UNEP study also found that soil degradation and loss of wetlands remain major problems in North America, although Canada and the United States have removed much of the toxic waste from the Great Lakes and set aside more than 10 percent of their lands as protected areas.

Despite the litany of depressing statistics, Scherr believes that many individuals and corporations in the United States have embraced sustainable development.

‘’At the national level it didn’t have the kind of impact that people hoped,” he says, ‘’but Agenda 21 (the global plan of action arising out of Rio) in some ways really took hold at the community level”.

That explains, for example, why water quality in urban areas has improved, Scherr says.

That community commitment will become apparent at the WSSD, he predicts.

‘’When people go to Johannesburg they’re going to see that there is (still) a global movement”, which is different than the traditional geo-political model controlled by national leaders; ‘’sort of an Internet world” is how Scherr describes it.

At least 100 presidents, prime ministers and monarchs are scheduled to attend the meeting, he adds. ‘’People will look for vision and guidance from those leaders, but there will be 40,000 other people there.”

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