The United States’s well-funded green lobby mounted an unprecedented effort to oust US president George W Bush, denouncing his environmental record as the worst in US history. Now they are reduced to hoping, against the odds, that the former oil executive will address climate change, energy security and biodiversity in his search for a lasting legacy.
”He pledged to reach out to Democrats and the environment is certainly one area ripe for bipartisan action,” says James Lyons, who served as under-secretary for natural resources and the environment in the Clinton administration and now lectures at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. ”On the other hand, all the evidence so far is that the environment is not important to him and we now have a more conservative Senate more likely to ignore global environmental challenges than embrace them.”
In his first four years, Bush walked away from the Kyoto negotiations on climate change, reneged on a pledge to regulate industrial carbon dioxide emissions, secured an exemption from the Montreal protocol — enabling US farmers to continue using methyl bromide, a potent ozone destroyer — and repealed several hundred regulations protecting clean air, water, roadless forests, wetlands and national parks.
Nevertheless, Eileen Claussen, the director of the Pew Centre on Climate Change in Washington DC, finds grounds for optimism. She points to the Kyoto treaty’s ratification and unilateral action on emissions reductions by US states and corporations as evidence that pressure is mounting for White House action.
A sizeable minority of senators, led by Republican John McCain, are also pressing for a national climate plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
”Ask anyone in the Bush administration for an honest opinion and they will tell you that restrictions on carbon emissions in this country are inevitable,” Claussen says. Next year’s talks on a post-Kyoto climate agreement offer an opportunity for the international community to ”develop new approaches to better engage the US”.
One early indicator of Bush’s environmental intentions will be whether he backs expected new efforts by the Republican Senate to open up the Arctic national wildlife refuge to oil drilling. ”If they do, we’re in for the same divisive business as usual,” warns David Jhirad, vice-president for science and research at the World Resources Institute. ”If not, perhaps they will be ready to discuss more innovative solutions to energy efficiency.”
The best way to win over the administration is by playing the industrial competitiveness card, says Jhirad, arguing that tighter federal fuel efficiency standards are essential if US automakers are to retain market share in the European Union, Japan and China.
The green lobby is likely to argue for reformed international trade and aid policies aimed at reducing world poverty as part of Bush’s war on terror. Jhirad points out: ”A world full of poor people is a very insecure, unstable world and a lot of bureaucrats in the administration are working on the connections between these issues.”
On climate change, the most likely scenario between now and 2008, according to Jhirad, will be a growing divergence between federal inaction and growing state and corporate activity. Blocks of north-eastern and western states are instituting voluntary carbon trading schemes and more major companies are joining voluntary carbon markets. California, the world’s fifth-biggest economy, is set to introduce regulatory measures to reduce vehicle greenhouse gas emissions.
Meanwhile, pressures are growing on Prime Minister Tony Blair, from both sides of the Atlantic, to call in the war debt owed to him by Bush by negotiating US concessions on climate change. Blair has pledged to make climate and overseas aid central issues of the United Kingdom’s G8 presidency in 2005. ”Our government must deliver on its commitment to draw Bush into serious negotiations for a post-Kyoto world,” says Jonathon Porritt, director of the United Kingdom-based Forum for the Future. — Â