US President George W. Bush emerged from the Gleneagles summit Friday once again the victor on climate change, appearing to compromise but in reality giving no ground.
The US administration repeated in Scotland the tactics it has used at every conference where global warming has been an issue since Johannesburg in 2002. It makes minor, vague concessions, other countries claim a breakthrough, but nothing much changes.
Bush, alone of the G8 leaders, refuses to accept the consensus of the scientific community, including that in the US, that climate change is a manmade phenomenon and there is an urgent need to cut carbon emissions. The US is the only G8 country to refuse to sign up to the 1997 Kyoto treaty, which sets targets for curbing emissions.
The section on climate change in the Gleneagles communique published yesterday is not fundamentally different from that contained in G8 communiques since 1990, with lots of expressions of concern, but stopping short of proposed action: no targets and no timetable.
France had threatened in the run-up to the summit to divide the G8 on the issue. Jacques Chirac, the French president, set out five points on which he was not prepared to compromise, including an acceptance by the US of the scientific evidence on climate change and a reference to the K word that Mr Bush normally shuns: the Kyoto treaty.
On Thursday evening, in a break from diplomatic protocol, Chirac more or less leaked to the press the section of the communique on climate change. He admitted it was not all that he had wanted but it was a "partial victory" for which he was claiming much of the credit.
But environmentalist groups such as Friends of the Earth said the communique showed that no progress at all had been made. Far from accepting the scientific evidence, it simply says that the G8, including the US, would only act to stop and reverse the growth of greenhouse gases as "science justifies." That allows the US to continue to refuse to act until it decides, if it ever does, that the science is conclusive.
There is a reference to the K word but it is not one that ties down the U.S. It is just a statement of the existing position.
"Those of us who have ratified the Kyoto protocol welcome its entry into force and will work to make it a success."
In other words, the seven members of the G8 who signed it will continue to work within its framework, while Bush continues to ignore it.
Tony Blair claimed yesterday that at least he had succeeded in setting up a new forum for dialogue between the G8, including the US, and emerging countries such as China and India to discuss climate change, the first to be held in London in November.
But there are lots of such forums that the US dutifully attends without committing itself to multilateral agreements that most of the rest of the world accepts.
The next big international conference on climate will be held in Montreal. But the consensus among the environmental groups at Gleneagles was that there will be no real change on the part of the US until after Bush ceases to be president.
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