by Hilary French
When a last-minute deal was struck a year ago in contentious climate change talks in Kyoto, Japan, environmentalists breathed a sigh of relief. It soon became clear that celebration was premature.
With the ink not yet dry on the Kyoto accord, U.S. senators were already pledging to block ratification of the agreement. The Clinton administration bowed to this reality by agreeing not to submit the protocol for a vote until the Senators' demands that key developing countries be brought into the accord are met.
Argentina and Kazakhstan broke with other developing countries at the recent meeting in Buenos Aires of the conference of the parties to the climate treaty, and agreed to accept voluntary emissions targets. But populous countries such as China and India showed no inclination to follow suit. There is thus little chance that the accord will even be put to a vote in the U.S. Senate before the presidential election in 2000.
The problems plaguing the Kyoto protocol are just the latest example of a larger pattern of American eco-isolationism. Environmental threats rank increasingly high as international security issues, yet the United States is widely seen as a laggard rather than a leader in the international environmental arena.
The Kyoto protocol was a follow-on to the Convention on Climate Change, a product of the June 1992 Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro under United Nations auspices.
The other major accord reached in Rio, the Convention on Biological Diversity, has so far failed to pass muster with the U.S. Senate, although 174 other countries have approved it. Recent warnings from leading scientists that we are in the midst of an era of mass extinction of species underscore the urgent need to translate this accord from words into action.
The Rio summit also set in motion negotiations for a treaty on desertification that is intended to prevent the further degradation of arid lands, usually as a result of poor agricultural practices, overgrazing or deforestation.
More than a billion hectares of arid lands are already degraded worldwide, an area greater in size than China. Hundreds of millions of people suffer the consequences, which can include malnutrition, forced migration and economic ruin.
The United States has so far refused to join the 144 countries that have become parties to this accord since it was completed in early 1994. President Bill Clinton used his trip to Africa in the spring to urge the Senate to ratify the desertification treaty, but the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Jesse Helms, failed to bring the accord forward for a vote.
The United States has also not yet joined the 128 countries that have ratified the 1982 Law of the Sea Treaty, or the 122 countries that are party to the 1989 Basel convention on the export of hazardous wastes.
Recent polls indicate that the Senate's eco-isolationist stance does not reflect public opinion. On global warming, for example, a Harris Poll found that 74 percent of Americans who knew about the Kyoto protocol said they approve it. Other polls have found a high level of public support for cooperating through the United Nations to combat shared threats.
The business community is of mixed mind when it comes to international environmental engagement. Strong business opposition can stop environmental treaties in their tracks, but a growing number of American companies are beginning to understand that their interests are better served when the United States has a seat at the international table.
Charles Johnson, president of the seed company Pioneer Hi-Bred International, said in calling for ratification of the biodiversity treaty in hearings before the Senate Finance Committee: "This is too important a treaty ... to have our government on the sidelines as protocols are negotiated." In a similar vein, British Petroleum and Shell have recently withdrawn from the obstructionist Global Climate Coalition.
Successful environmental diplomacy requires a cooperative, multilateral approach rather than the unilateral model that predominated during the Cold War. The U.S. Congress must accept this reality if America is to play a leading role on the international environmental stage and if the world is to stave off catastrophic environmental damage.
The writer, vice president for research at the Worldwatch Institute, a nongovernmental monitoring group, contributed this comment to the International Herald Tribune.