How to Stop the Planet From Burning

The following is an excerpt from George Monbiot's Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning (South End Press, 2007).

All over Washington, you can hear the giant scraping sound of officials and legislators frantically back-tracking. After years of obfuscation, denial, and lies about climate change, all but the most hardened recidivists are rebranding themselves as friends of the earth.

In February, two senior White House officials published an open letter seeking to correct inaccurate stories in the press "that the President's concern about climate change is new. In fact," they reported, "climate change has been a top priority since the President's first year in office." To prove it, they had found 37 words Bush said about the subject in 2001; 46 words in 2002; and 32 words in January 2007. In January 2007 he had even managed to say "climate change." This demonstrated, they claimed, that he has shown "continued leadership on the issue."

Both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill are falling over themselves to show how they have sought to save the world. The Senate's vote in 1997-95 to zero-to sink the Kyoto Protocol before it was signed has been forgotten. Joe Barton's congressional Inquisition, in which scientists who refused to alter their results to suit the oil companies were questioned as if they were members of Al Qaeda, never happened. Even Larry Craig, once one of the Senate's most outspoken climate change deniers, now claims that he has been helping to lead the world "toward cleaner technologies." Only Senator James Inhofe, last of the dinosaurs, still maintains that efforts to prevent climate change amount to nothing more than "profiteering" and "chicanery." After the war, almost everyone becomes a member of the Resistance.

George Bush's government has sought to sabotage every effective international effort to prevent global warming. It recruited China and India to an "alternative Kyoto" (the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development), without targets or sanctions, in order to prevent them from signing a binding treaty.

Then it has announced that as India and China haven't signed a binding treaty, neither can the United States. It has all but wrecked the talks attempting to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012. But the inconvenient truth we seek to forget is that the Clinton-Gore administration did even greater damage.

Bush might have pulled the US out of the Kyoto Protocol, but the Clinton administration destroyed the Protocol as an effective instrument-for everyone. It insisted on measures which allow countries to trade hot air and launder fake cuts. It encouraged other countries to reduce their targets (and thereby allow a higher level of emissions).

In his speech to the Kyoto conference in December 1997, Al Gore used the same mendacious formula George Bush now employs, claiming that limiting carbon emissions the US might otherwise have produced in a hypothetical future equates to real cuts in actual emissions. It was one of the most disgraceful moments in the Clinton presidency, and is impossible to reconcile with the subsequent career of the former next president of the United States.

Clinton failed to submit the protocol to the Senate, Bush refused to do so. There is little practical difference. Beyond avoiding responsibility, both the Clinton and Bush administrations have argued that the US is actually saving the world by investing billions in developing new, low carbon technologies. It is true that many of the most exciting developments have come from the United States.

But tackling climate change, like dieting, is as much about what you don't do as what you do. Developing low carbon technologies without cutting your emissions is like eating two Big Macs, four donuts and an ice cream sundae and then, to be healthy, also eating a salad. Unless the new technologies replace fossil fuel burning-rather than simply supplementing it-they cannot reduce a nation's emissions.