ENVIRONMENT: Blair Will Try to Green This Bush

By Sanjay Suri Reprint | | Print |

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Nov 4 2004 (IPS) - British Prime Minister Tony Blair will attempt the near impossible next year: he wants to persuade U.S. President George W. Bush to become more environment-friendly.

Britain will hold presidency of the G8 summit in Scotland in July next year. And Blair has said he will make climate change one of his two priorities, with development for Africa as the other.

That will mean running straight into Bush, who pulled the United States out of the Kyoto protocol, a pledge to cut emission of atmosphere-warming gases like carbon dioxide and methane.

Blair is facing demands already from environmental groups to take an effective stand at G8 (comprising the United States, Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia). The G8 leaders will meet at a resort in Scotland July 6-8 next year. Britain will then also hold rotating presidency of the European Union (EU).

Members from the Britain-based Campaign against Climate Change, supported by the Green Party and the non-governmental organisations Friends of the Earth and the World Development Movement held a demonstration outside the U.S. embassy in London Thursday to demand an environment-friendly policy from the new Bush administration. This was among the earlier anti-Bush demonstrations in his new term.

”We want Blair to use his leverage with Bush to bring him back to the negotiating table,” Katie Elliott from Friends of the Earth told IPS. ”Blair needs public support, there are tough decisions for him to make.”

The groups plan to step up their campaign over the next several months ”to make sure Blair follows his words into action,” Elliott said.

Blair’s words have sounded right. He has called for a ”green industrial revolution” but admitted he may fail to get the United States to join.

”Let’s be absolutely blunt about it: I do not think the U.S. Senate is going to vote for ratification of Kyoto,” Blair told a meeting in London last month. ”It would be nice if they did, but I can’t see it.”

But he said also he will take up the climate issue at the G8 meeting. ”We have to do two things at the G8 – the first is an explicit acceptance of the science by all the governments there. That has not really happened up until now for a very obvious reason, because the next question is: ‘Well, what are you going to do about it?’

”The next thing we need is an agreement on the process to take this forward. That will require an examination of the science and technologies… step by step so that certain measures are taken.”

But while Blair may not be able to get ratification of the Kyoto Protocol from the United States, failure to win any U.S. concession will be a political blow to him now that he has made climate control central to the G8 presidency.

The opposition Conservative party leader Michael Howard has attacked Blair already for his failure to persuade the United States to sign up to the Kyoto protocol.

Blair has for the moment set his sights low. He has said ”it is the time now to sound the alarm firmly, to put it (climate change) on the agenda and at least have an open and serious debate.”

Environmentalists had hoped that their work would be done for them if Democrat candidate John Kerry had been elected. They now see they have a job on their hands.

The re-election of Bush ”is a bad day for the environment,” Friends of the Earth director Tony Juniper said in a statement. ”It is now essential that Tony Blair uses his special relationship with the U.S. President to join the international war on global warming.”

The world will pay ”a heavy environmental price if the United States continues to ignore the catastrophic threat posed by climate change,” Juniper said. ”If Mr Bush wants the U.S. to be a respected part of the international community he must take urgent action now.”

Bush has ”an appalling environmental record,” Friends of the Earth says. ”He has invested some 38 billion dollars in subsidies to fossil fuel and nuclear industries, advanced policies to open up Africa and Central Asia to oil exploration, and allowing drilling for oil in Alaska.”