It's Bush vs. Humanity at UN Climate Change Convention

Posted by Howie Klein, Down With Tyranny! at 3:09 PM on December 15, 2007.

Since the beginning of the month I've been in India and Thailand, reading local newspapers, talking with people and watching local TV (in India, where it's in English), as well as the BBC World Report. I'm not sure how U.S. mass media is covering the Bali conference on global warming that is seeking an international blueprint for a post-Kyoto way forward. Remember, Kyoto was the first, though no no means the last, treaty unilaterally trashed by the illegitimate Bush Regime as soon as it was installed by the partisan Supreme Court. Relative to the rest of the world, coverage of global warming as a crisis has been very, very muted in the U.S. Corporately-owned media has gone right along with the Bush Regime and the Republican Party in playing it down and deluding Americans into thinking everything was still being debated by scientists. I suspect-- and I would wager-- that coverage is extremely modest-- at best. If India, Thailand and the BBC are any indication, however, it is far and away the #1 story of the month in the rest of the world-- bigger than Iraq, Afghanistan, Islamic terrorism, the subprime mortgage meltdown, impending recession, rising inflation or American sports figures on dope. And the subtext is bad... for America.

A simple version of the story is that the rest of the world realizes mankind is nearing an existential tipping point and that if really serious measures aren't taken to combat man made global warming, humanity itself will be in jeopardy-- facing the most difficult challenges it's faced since Adam and Eve first encountered Dick Cheney in the Garden of Eden.

Meanwhile, other countries have been taking all this far more seriously than the U.S. While American students and a handful of environmentalists and hipsters on the American East and West coasts buy more (over-priced) hybrids and try to remember to use energy-saving light-bulbs, I noticed, somewhat shockingly, that New Delhi has gone from a nearly uninhabitable stinking hellhole of filthy, cancerous pollution to a city with virtually none of the noxious black emissions that used to make we want to wear a gas mask there-- and this despite massive growth in traffic volume since my last visit. No more black emissions belching out of vehicles. Even the buses, taxis and tuk-tuks us clean-burning gas and although noise pollution is still deafening, everyone has a CNG sticker on his vehicle indicating that they are using clean-burning gas. While this was happening in India, toxic emissions in the U.S. have risen by 20%! The news out of Bali reads like this: the whole world has come together to collectively try to solve mankind's biggest looming problem while the most selfish, greedy power on the globe, the U.S., sabotages every effort. The hatred being generated towards America is unlike anything I have ever seen in my travels, which started in 1969 and have included 4 filled-up passports, almost 100 countries, and over 6 years of living abroad. I'm actually meeting people in India and Thailand who know who James Inhofe is and who identify him as an enemy of mankind's survival! I bet that outside of Oklahoma and the Beltway, there are very few Americans who have ever heard of him!

Today's Bangkok Post highlights the absolute fury Europeans are expressing towards the Bush Regime's foot dragging and sabotage. The E.U. has declared that if Bush and his lackeys don't shape up on climate issues immediately, they will boycott the face-saving environmental Bush is convening in Honolulu in January. Portugal holds the rotating E.U. presidency right now and Humberto Rosa, Portugal's chief environmental negotiator, spoke for all of Europe when he said, "If we would have a failure in Bali it would be meaningless to have a major economies' meeting [Bush's MEM] in the U.S... We're not blackmailing. If no Bali, no MEM."

The Bush Regime, which has been on the defensive all week and is severely alienated from the rest of the world, reacted predictably. A White House flack: "We don't feel that comments like that are very constructive when we are working so hard to find common ground on a way forward."

Anyone who has followed the Bush Regime's policies and tactics in the past 7 years well knows that "working so hard to find common ground" means threatening and bribing everyone else to accept its reactionary positions. The biggest applause at the Bali conference came when Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore stood up and said aloud what everyone has been whispering: that Bush is intentionally wrecking the conference's goals of capping greenhouse gas emissions.

The pompous, even contemptuous, Bush Regime response to the criticism leveled against it is nothing short of galling to the rest of the world. "We will lead," Bush's delegate blustered, "we will continue to lead. But leadership also requires others to fall in line and follow." But following a self-proclaimed "leader" more concerned with the ideological imperative of massive profits for its campaign donors isn't something anyone else is buying right now.

In his new book, Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party, Glenn Hurowitz touches, if only tangentially, on how Bush and the GOP have led America down the wrong path on global warming and how the Democratic Party has by and large failed-- especially when it comes to fear-based opportunists like Clinton and Obama-- to take strong and courageous stands against the Republican agenda of greed, blind selfishness and death.

A study by Mark Lubell, Sammy Zahran, and Arnold Vedlitz in the September issue of the journal Political Behavior found that people's perception of how great a risk global warming is, was the second biggest determinant whether they would support pro-environmental policies and take political action in support of those policies... Their risk perception, or to put it in emotional terms, their fear trumped all other factors measured in the study, like their level of knowledge about the issue, how much they thought they could influence the problem (their hope), or their level of education.

Although Republicans routinely and brazenly (and effectively) use fear as their #1 tool in winning elections at every level, most Democrats are afraid to go anywhere near that tool. That's one of the reasons they keep losing elections. I've watched some of the Blue America-endorsed candidates (and, now, officeholders) use fear of environmental catastrophe successfully in their appeals to voters, including Hilda Solis (CA), John Hall (NY), Jerry McNerney (CA), and, this year, Andrew Rice. It cane be done and it can be done to clobber reactionaries. If Andrew Rice unseats James Inhofe (R-OK), America's #1 anti-environment politic extremist, the message will reverberate across the country-- a message that not a single Republican elected official will fail to understand. All the worst Inside the Beltway pundits are writing Oklahoma off as a lost cause. They're wrong. And climate change could make the difference... yes, even in Oklahoma, where the dust bowl isn't just something from dusty history books.

Tagged as: bush, global warming, climate change

Howie Klein is the creator of the blog Down With Tyranny!