United States Dropped Ball on Sustainable Developement Summit
By Peter Douglas
Opinions Writer

Last week, most Americans were reading in the papers about baseball strikes, corporate scandals involving the president, the Bush administration considering war with Iraq—all headlines which could have been seen as easily in the early nineties as in 2002. Yet at the same time another instance of history repeating itself was completely ignored by the media. The World Summit on Sustainable Development, held in Johannesburg at the start of September, which was a follow-up to the 1992 Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro, went practically unmentioned in the mainstream American media.

The media wasn’t alone in ignoring the summit. President Bush decided to skip it, despite the fact that almost every other important world leader attended, and that his father attended the 1992 summit in Rio de Janeiro. His absence made clear an increasing ambivalence the U.S. government has shown towards global environmental problems, and the situation of developing nations, the two major issues that were addressed at the summit. Yet President Bush must take a proactive stance on these issues, not out of a high-minded ideal of doing what is best for the world, but because it is in the best interest of the United States.

For years the premise, if not practice, of our foreign policy has been to promote political stability worldwide, because this is what is best for American interests. Right now we are fighting a “War on Terrorism” in order to protect ourselves from events such as the September 11 terrorist attacks, when political instability from across the globe suddenly hit us right between the eyes. By ignoring the Johannesburg summit, though, we are in many ways promoting this same instability. Two major focuses of the World Summit were the AIDS pandemic, and the water shortages that are plaguing much of the world. While solutions to these problems were discussed and resolutions adopted, no major effort to confront them was begun, mostly because of reluctance from the U.S. Yet there is no way that a nation can be politically stable if half its citizens are dying of AIDS or do not have drinking water. Those issues must be addressed first, and if they are not political chaos ensues. Political chaos anywhere, as we have discovered with Afghanistan, is bad news for us, the world’s lone superpower.

Our reluctance to act on environmental issues is causing political problems for us as well. During the summit Russia announced it would ratify the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gasses, meaning the protocol will now go into affect for the 87 nations that have signed it. The U.S. government made a statement saying that while it will not sign the protocol, it supports any nations that choose to. This was not evident, however, when the same day the U.S. forced the European Union to drop timetables and targets for member countries to stop using oil and gas and switch to solar and wind power.

Actions such as these have begun to sour the once-friendly relationship between the United States and Europe. While we are clearly the most powerful nation in the world and are not seriously threatened by any other, it is not a positive development to have much of the world view us as a corporate-controlled global bully instead of the benevolent democracy we claim to be. By refusing to compromise on the issue of climate change, we are not only increasing the potential hazards of global warming, but also setting up a polarized geopolitical situation of the world-versus-us.

One excuse often used to justify our inaction on these issues is the economy. The Kyoto protocol just doesn’t make economic sense for the United States, Bush will repeatedly tell us (as our economy slides due to bad accounting and corporate fraud). Yet, in the long term, refusing to address issues such as global warming and worldwide poverty will hurt us economically. Wind-generated electricity is now the fastest-growing source of power in the world. European and Japanese firms dominate this booming market, leaving the U.S. far behind. Meanwhile our government continues to encourage oil and gas development over renewable energy; we may reap higher profits now, but in doing so we sacrifice our future competitiveness. The same is true of many other innovative technologies that can help to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. On the other hand, globalization can’t really work if the majority of the people in the world can’t find reliable water, much less buy American products. If American decision-makers simply extended their economic time frame to a few decades from a few years, becoming more involved in solving these global problems would make much more sense.

So, if attending the Johannes-burg summit and taking an active role there was in the best interests of the United States, why did President Bush stay at home? The answer isn’t completely clear, and it will become less and less so as everyone forgets about the summit and focuses on the imminent invasion of Iraq. And yet a nagging doubt suggests that the reason is that what Bush is representing is not the best interest of the United States at all.