The Militant(logo) 
    Vol.61/No.46           December 29, 1997 
 
 
Nationalism Permeates Opponents Of Kyoto Treaty  

BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
Nationalism has become the common banner of a wide array of social forces in the United States - from businessmen, to rightist politicians and pundits, to top officials of the AFL- CIO - in their campaign against the Kyoto treaty on "global warming."

"The Kyoto treaty is manifestly unfair to the United States because Third World nations, including Mexico, China, Indonesia, India and Brazil, would not be subject to the emissions restrictions imposed on us," said Phyllis Schlafly, a right-wing propagandist, in a column in the December 10 Conservative Chronicle. "That would accelerate the flight of U.S. industries and jobs to those countries." The column was headlined "Clinton may get toasted by global warming."

"One option being discussed is `emissions trading,' i.e., to allow industries that find the emissions limits prohibitively expensive to buy emissions permits from the Third World," Schlafly wrote. "That's just a devious type of foreign giveaway and would redistribute U.S. wealth to other countries (which is probably the real purpose of the treaty anyway)."

Many trade union officials who campaigned for Washington not to sign such an agreement used similar arguments in recent articles, speeches, and advertisements.

The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) ran an ad this fall along with other groups titled "Global Warming Treaty Leaves American Workers Out in the Cold." Top union officials, including UMWA president Cecil Roberts, have been campaigning on this along with the coal bosses.

"President Roberts and Peabody Coal Co. President Pete Lilly were spokespersons in September at a joint labor/management press conference to announce the release of two new studies highlighting the treaty's adverse economic effect on industrialized workers in the U.S. and other developed nations," said an article in the September/October issue of the United Mine Workers Journal. "The pair also denounced the treaty's total exemption of developing nations like China, India and Mexico from the limit on `greenhouse gas' emissions."

"This treaty is all pain and no gain. It will have a devastating effect not only on the coal industry, but on every industrial sector," Roberts said, according to the UMW Journal. "For the nation, it means lost jobs, lower wages, higher energy costs and a ballooning trade deficit... We need to question why negotiators of this treaty aren't looking out for the interests of American workers."

Representatives of big business have also been campaigning along similar lines. "Many powerful industries have lobbied intensely against mandatory reductions in carbon dioxide, saying it will put the U.S. at a disadvantage and lead to thousands of layoffs of American workers," said an article in the December 11 Wall Street Journal. If energy prices shoot up as a result of stricter limits on carbon dioxide emissions, it continued, "six big U.S. industries - aluminum, cement, chemicals, oil, paper and steel - could suffer big job cuts, concluded an analysis by the U.S. Energy Department."

U.S. president William Clinton has defended Washington's signature on the Kyoto accord. At the same time, vice-president Albert Gore said the White House will not present the treaty for ratification to the U.S. Senate until more "developing countries" sign on to it. He added that the agreement was a vindication for the administration's "market based approach," according to the December 12 Financial Times of London.

Gore was referring to Clinton's plan for a system of tradable emissions permits, which would allow governments that voluntarily reduce emissions below a certain level to sell the difference as unused "right" to pollute. This is the scheme now being used between companies inside the United States under the Clean Air Act of 1990. Washington is obviously the top prospective buyer of such permits. This pollution exchange proposal was strongly opposed by Beijing. It was left open for further talks set for next November.

While the conference in Kyoto, Japan, was touted as having something to do with protecting the world environment, the proposals and debate at the meeting were about jockeying between the major capitalist powers to promote each of their national interests in competition with other regimes. Under the deal that was finally negotiated, the European Union would reduce its emissions by 8 percent from the 1990 level by the year 2010; Washington by 7 percent; Tokyo by 6 percent. Some smaller countries face lesser reductions and others none at all. The U.S. Senate voted unanimously in July not to ratify any agreement that doesn't include emissions reductions by China and Third World countries. Representatives of many semicolonial countries in Kyoto argued that the burden for reducing greenhouse emissions should be on the industrially developed imperialist countries, where the greatest portion of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere originates.

Many liberal reformers and petty bourgeois groups campaigning for such a treaty - who usually profess that the planet is threatened with imminent catastrophe through pollution - criticized the final accord in Kyoto as lacking teeth. Greenpeace, for example, said the deal was "a tragedy and a farce" because of the remaining loopholes.  
 
 
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