not a surprise
Jul. 7th, 2005 06:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chelidonBush, Blair Deadlocked on Global Warming
(excerpt of article below)
It would have been a real shock if this had turned out differently, given who is in the White House, but still, I grieve. Another opportunity to change the course of the global environment lost.
And I have friends over at the G-8 protests, and I worry that the bombings today will give police and governments, there and here, the excuse to employ still more draconian measures to suppress political and social dissent. It happened over here, including in D.C., and at the Republican Convention, where the slim premise that terrorists might use any chaos present at a protest action to aid an attack, was used as a convenient excuse to curtail freedoms and increase repression of all legitimate political protest. The fact that the bombings today coincided with the G-8 meeting will surely be used as a further excuse and a justification for more of the same kind of reasoning. If so, the terrorists score a victory, causing us to eliminate freedoms we once held dear, and make our society more like what they, and some in our government would like to see -- an autocratic theocracy.
It's interesting -- at the same time as these kinds of protest actions have become in some practical ways less effective than they once were (for a variety of reasons which could take up a post all on their own), the amount of governmental force and effort used to discourage and suppress even small protests seems to me to have escalated enormously. Part of that is, of course, all that "anti-terrorism" money flooding into the law enforcement agencies these days -- you have to use all that cool new equipment somewhere, and I know from what sources inside law enforcement have told me, many agencies and arms of the government have been using domestic protest actions and events as a kind of free, live anti-terrorism training -- testing communication, tactics, infiltration, surveillance, disruption, and so on. Patently illegal in many cases, but there it is.
But I think there's a deeper reason for the emphasis on squashing and minimizing political protest, beyond mere boredom and training purposes. The Bush administration has been one of the most secretive, self-righteous, and unwilling to accept criticism, from within or without, of any U.S. administration in recent history. You have to go back to the Nixon era to find one even remotely as paranoid, self-deluded or sure of its own infallibility. Pride goeth before the fall, perhaps, but in the meantime, there is an almost megalomaniacal inability to tolerate the kind of debate and dissent that is essential to a functioning democracy. Protests, even small ones, show a lack of control, and Bush's neocon handlers are all about control. Yahweh doesn't tolerate protest and dissent in heaven, and neither should his army of God here on earth. That only slightly overstates the case, and I wish I was kidding.
Ah, well. There's always hope. And I just now put the deposit down on a wood boiler to replace my oil furnace, which will, as of a few weeks from now, reduce the U.S. heating oil consumption by at least 1000 gallons per year, and replace it with a carbon-neutral source of heat. A small difference, perhaps, but we all do what we can.
--------
GLENEAGLES, Scotland, July 7 - President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair failed to reach agreement on international efforts to combat global warming today, as the two leaders declared a shared belief that humans are contributing to rising temperatures but deadlocked over a solution.
On the first full day of meetings between the world's eight major industrial powers that were disrupted by bombings in London, Bush and Blair emerged from breakfast at this highland golf resort to tell reporters that a new international pact to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could be at least seven years away.
"We're not going to negotiate some new treaty on climate change" at the economic summit known as the Group of Eight, or G-8, Blair told reporters. "What this is about is seeing whether it will be possible in the future to bring people back into consensus together.
Can we do that? I don't know, but it's important that we at least begin a process of dialogue that allows us to make progress on this."
Blair, the summit's host who is basking in Britain's winning the 2012 Olympics but struggling to win U.S. approval of his international agenda here, lobbied Bush to embrace the mandatory curbs on greenhouse gases contained in the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty on emissions standards that was rejected by Bush and the U.S. Senate. The United States is the only country represented at the summit that did not sign the 1997 Kyoto treaty.
Bush today refused to budge, warning that such mandatory standards could cripple the U.S. economy and prove feckless if big polluters like China and India are not included, which they are not under Kyoto. "I also strongly believe that technologies and the proper use of technologies will enable the world to grow our economies, and at the same time, be wiser about how we protect the environment," Bush said.
If a consensus is not reach by 2012, when the Kyoto agreement expires, "then we've got a real problem for the future," Blair warned. The prime minister's decision to talk about concrete solutions next decade represents a setback to Blair and others who believe scientists warning of a dangerous rise in the earth's temperature are right. Instead, leaders here are putting the finishing touches on a joint statement about the warming climate and the potentially dangerous effect of man-made greenhouse emissions. "There is a consensus we need to move forward together," Bush said.
(snip)
(excerpt of article below)
It would have been a real shock if this had turned out differently, given who is in the White House, but still, I grieve. Another opportunity to change the course of the global environment lost.
And I have friends over at the G-8 protests, and I worry that the bombings today will give police and governments, there and here, the excuse to employ still more draconian measures to suppress political and social dissent. It happened over here, including in D.C., and at the Republican Convention, where the slim premise that terrorists might use any chaos present at a protest action to aid an attack, was used as a convenient excuse to curtail freedoms and increase repression of all legitimate political protest. The fact that the bombings today coincided with the G-8 meeting will surely be used as a further excuse and a justification for more of the same kind of reasoning. If so, the terrorists score a victory, causing us to eliminate freedoms we once held dear, and make our society more like what they, and some in our government would like to see -- an autocratic theocracy.
It's interesting -- at the same time as these kinds of protest actions have become in some practical ways less effective than they once were (for a variety of reasons which could take up a post all on their own), the amount of governmental force and effort used to discourage and suppress even small protests seems to me to have escalated enormously. Part of that is, of course, all that "anti-terrorism" money flooding into the law enforcement agencies these days -- you have to use all that cool new equipment somewhere, and I know from what sources inside law enforcement have told me, many agencies and arms of the government have been using domestic protest actions and events as a kind of free, live anti-terrorism training -- testing communication, tactics, infiltration, surveillance, disruption, and so on. Patently illegal in many cases, but there it is.
But I think there's a deeper reason for the emphasis on squashing and minimizing political protest, beyond mere boredom and training purposes. The Bush administration has been one of the most secretive, self-righteous, and unwilling to accept criticism, from within or without, of any U.S. administration in recent history. You have to go back to the Nixon era to find one even remotely as paranoid, self-deluded or sure of its own infallibility. Pride goeth before the fall, perhaps, but in the meantime, there is an almost megalomaniacal inability to tolerate the kind of debate and dissent that is essential to a functioning democracy. Protests, even small ones, show a lack of control, and Bush's neocon handlers are all about control. Yahweh doesn't tolerate protest and dissent in heaven, and neither should his army of God here on earth. That only slightly overstates the case, and I wish I was kidding.
Ah, well. There's always hope. And I just now put the deposit down on a wood boiler to replace my oil furnace, which will, as of a few weeks from now, reduce the U.S. heating oil consumption by at least 1000 gallons per year, and replace it with a carbon-neutral source of heat. A small difference, perhaps, but we all do what we can.
--------
GLENEAGLES, Scotland, July 7 - President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair failed to reach agreement on international efforts to combat global warming today, as the two leaders declared a shared belief that humans are contributing to rising temperatures but deadlocked over a solution.
On the first full day of meetings between the world's eight major industrial powers that were disrupted by bombings in London, Bush and Blair emerged from breakfast at this highland golf resort to tell reporters that a new international pact to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could be at least seven years away.
"We're not going to negotiate some new treaty on climate change" at the economic summit known as the Group of Eight, or G-8, Blair told reporters. "What this is about is seeing whether it will be possible in the future to bring people back into consensus together.
Can we do that? I don't know, but it's important that we at least begin a process of dialogue that allows us to make progress on this."
Blair, the summit's host who is basking in Britain's winning the 2012 Olympics but struggling to win U.S. approval of his international agenda here, lobbied Bush to embrace the mandatory curbs on greenhouse gases contained in the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty on emissions standards that was rejected by Bush and the U.S. Senate. The United States is the only country represented at the summit that did not sign the 1997 Kyoto treaty.
Bush today refused to budge, warning that such mandatory standards could cripple the U.S. economy and prove feckless if big polluters like China and India are not included, which they are not under Kyoto. "I also strongly believe that technologies and the proper use of technologies will enable the world to grow our economies, and at the same time, be wiser about how we protect the environment," Bush said.
If a consensus is not reach by 2012, when the Kyoto agreement expires, "then we've got a real problem for the future," Blair warned. The prime minister's decision to talk about concrete solutions next decade represents a setback to Blair and others who believe scientists warning of a dangerous rise in the earth's temperature are right. Instead, leaders here are putting the finishing touches on a joint statement about the warming climate and the potentially dangerous effect of man-made greenhouse emissions. "There is a consensus we need to move forward together," Bush said.
(snip)
