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   Vol.65/No.27            July 16, 2001 
 
 
Kyoto treaty fraud shows imperialist rivalries
(front page)
 
BY MAGGIE TROWE  
The debate over the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change brings into relief the tensions between U.S. imperialism and its competitors in Europe and Japan as each jockeys to promote its national interests. It also exposes the exploitive social relations between the billionaire capitalist families of the industrialized capitalist countries and the countries held in semicolonial bondage.

As Japanese prime minister Junichiro Koizumi headed for Washington to meet with U.S. president George Bush at the end of June, he told the media he would urge Bush to reverse his administration's decision against the accords and to sign the treaty. After meeting with Bush, Koizumi said he wasn't "disappointed in the president's position" on the Kyoto Protocol, adding that Bush is "enthusiastic about environmental issues." The Japanese prime minister said that there is "still time to discuss this issue" and that he had no "intention of proceeding without the cooperation of the United States."

Emerging from the discussions with U.S. administration officials, a spokesman for Japan's government-backed Federation of Electric Power Companies said, "We are greatly encouraged by the fact that a nation that plays a key role in the direction world energy policy takes has shifted to backing nuclear power."

About a third of Japan's electric power comes from its 51 commercial nuclear reactors. Bush's energy task force, headed by Vice President Richard Cheney, has called for increasing the use of nuclear power, which does not produce carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases."

Bush stuck to his guns during his recent trip to Europe on his March announcement that the administration would not sign the protocol or seek to impose mandatory emissions reductions for U.S. power plants and other companies.

The protocol was cobbled together in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997 at an 11-day conference of representatives from 150 countries. From the first day to the last, the meeting featured contending imperialist powers promoting their national interests at the expense of their rivals and of workers and farmers in the semicolonial world. It has been touted by its supporters as a means of limiting emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases thought to cause global warming.

The agreement would in theory require 39 industrialized countries to reduce their collective emissions of these gases to at least 5 percent below 1990 levels by a target period between 2008 and 2012. The plan would go into effect if ratified by countries representing 55 percent of the 1990 level of carbon dioxide emissions.

From the start, Washington, then under the administration of president William Clinton, demanded semicolonial countries also be required to make cuts in emissions. In addition, the final treaty contains a provision promoted by the Clinton administration that would allow wealthy countries to get around the treaty by purchasing "emission reduction units" from underdeveloped countries that currently have, or attain through voluntary reductions, emissions below the required level.

In effect, the wealthy capitalist countries would buy the "units" created by imperialist-imposed underdevelopment such as lack of power plants, few automobiles, and a low level of heavy industry.

Likely targets would be countries comprising the two billion people in the world who have no electricity and the more than 800 million who live with hunger and malnutrition.

The "emission credit" scam is not a new idea. In fact, it was made in the USA. The so-called Clean Air Act of 1990, adopted with bipartisan support, permits this sort of trade in pollution credits between capitalists in the United States.

The United States, which accounts for 25 percent of annual economic production in the world, had a growth of carbon emissions of 11.2 percent between 1990 and 1998, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, with a 2.7 percent rise last year from the burning of fossil fuels alone. Until recently Bush expressed the view that there is an "incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to, global climate change." More recently he and other administration officials have acknowledged there is a connection between global warming and greenhouse gases.

Bush has said the protocol's goals are "unrealistic" and that it is "fatally flawed" because it does not place mandatory cuts in emissions on "developing nations," including India and China, continuing the arguments advanced by the Clinton administration. The U.S. Senate voted 95-0 in 1997 against permitting Washington to participate in any global-warming treaty that does not mandate "new specific scheduled commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for Developing Country Parties within the same compliance period." This was also the policy of the trade union leadership, and the AFL-CIO lobbied for and endorsed this approach.

The U.S. rulers have attacked the Chinese workers state, considered to be the largest emitter of carbon dioxide after the United States, when in fact China has made strides in reducing emissions since 1996 according to a number of studies.

"China's emissions of carbon dioxide have shrunk by 17 percent since the mid-1990s," during which time the country's gross domestic product grew by 36 percent, reported researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. "Even without undertaking binding commitments under an international agreement," the report continued, China "has nevertheless contributed substantially to reducing growth in global emissions." Factors cited include ending state subsidies on coal and other measures to limit coal use, resulting in a 4 percent decline in coal consumption. By contrast during the same years the United States had the largest absolute increase in coal consumption.

The European powers fault Bush's "America First" approach, such as his remarks to German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in March that he wouldn't sign the Kyoto pact because "we will not do anything that harms our economy, because first things first are the people who live in America." However, the European capitalist governments act in the same nationalist self-interest. As Wall Street Journal staff reporter Cecilie Rohwedder wrote in April, "Some Europeans say part of the local finger-pointing could be a self-serving effort to score with voters ahead of major elections in Italy and Britain this year, and France and Germany in 2002. 'It gives you a moral position, a high ground to make yourself look good compared to others,' said Guillaume Parmenier, head of the Center for the United States at the French Institute for International Relations in Paris."

At the end of the 1997 Kyoto meeting the treaty was signed by representatives of participating nations, but no industrialized country has since ratified it.  
 
 
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