October 7, 2005

To Report Or Not To Report:

Tony Blair's Surprise U-Turn On Kyoto And The European Media

by Holger J. Thuss, Executive Director of CFACT Europe

Last July, British PM Blair said he was happy with the outcome of the G8 Summit in Gleneagles. For many he was the one who convinced President Bush to eventually accept the effects of human CO2-emissions on global warming. Ahead of the summit it was reported that conference "sherpas" are confident that Bush will sign on to a "vague" statement of intention "because of his friendship" with Tony Blair.

PM Blair's remarked at the Summit's final press conference that there is some "hope" for the problems of this world. This was interpreted by many that at least he believes, we can soon expect President Bush' signature on the Kyoto Protocol. Bush's focus on solving global energy problems through new technologies was widely ignored.

To talk about the complete failure of Kyoto was - and still is - politically incorrect. Only a rare few made the cast that Kyoto would never work and that Gleneagles would be the beginning of Kyoto's end.

In June, political analyst Christopher Horner outlined at this website that (no matter what EU-Commissioner Dimas and other optimists believe), "Europe itself is not complying with the Kyoto Protocol." Article four of the protocol requires member countries to reduce emissions by eight percent below their 1990 levels. Yet Portugal reports it will exceed promise by 66%, Spain by 61%, Greece by 51%, Ireland will be 41% over, Luxembourg 31%, Finland 27%, Denmark 26%, Italy by anywhere from 13-23% (the initial estimates suddenly worsened after submission), France 19%, Austria 18%, Belgium by 16%, and the Netherlands estimates it will be over by12%."

While many Europeans stand by the EU-Commission's rhetoric, at least PM Blair's sur-prisingly confessed on September 15 in New York City that he does not think "people are going, at least in the short term, going to start negotiating another major treaty like Kyoto."

Since countries like China or India would never agree to limit themselves to "sustainable" growth he made his message on Kyoto clear, "let's start getting behind this." The "real issue" according to Blair is "incentives" where the private and public sectors agree, "this is the direction policy is going to go". In other words: We don't need to delegate environmental decision-making to international organizations.

Kyoto-supporter Bill Clinton and other participants of the pompous "Special Opening Plenary Session: Perspectives of the Global Challenges of our Time" of his "Global Initiative" were not amused: "Whenever a political leader speaks the truth about the Kyoto global-warming treaty, the chattering classes treat him as if he were that upstart kid who said the emperor has no clothes. So pundits and politicians have derided British Prime Minister Tony Blair for saying he had been "changing his thinking" about the global-warming pact." (Debra J. Saunders, San Fran-cisco Chronicle, October 2, 2005).

"Kyoto Treaty RIP. That's not the headline in any newspaper this morning emerging from the first day of the Clinton Global Initiative, but it could have been - and should have been," declared James Pinkerton of TechCentralStation.com.

The British media was alone in Europe in recognizing Blair's u-turn and debate finally en-sued. Geoffrey Lean and Christopher Silvester reported in the Independent on Sunday that PM Blair's "admission" had "outraged environmentalists on both sides of the Atlantic" commenting that it "flies in the face of his promises made in the past two years and undermines the agreement he masterminded at this summer's Gleneagles Summit."

The same day, 25 September, Jonathan Leake of the Sunday Times noted that PM Blair "has hinted Britain may pull out of attempts to draw up a successor to the Kyoto climate treaty because the economic price of cutting greenhouse gas emissions is too high" and that PM Blair "suggested he no longer had faith in global agreements as a way of reversing rising greenhouse gas emissions. Instead he appeared to place his faith in science, technology and the free market - a position that President George W Bush adopted when he repudiated the Kyoto treaty in 2001."

Juliette Jowit of the Observer reported the same day, that PM Blair "was accused last night of backing down on the Kyoto agreement to tackle climate change after he confessed to 'chang-ing my thinking about this'." "The apparent change in tone by Blair is surprising, as he made climate change one of the major themes of his chairmanship of the G8 nations. It comes as Labour faces the embarrassing prospect of failing to meet Britain's own Kyoto targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions be-cause of rises in pollution since Labour came to power in 1997."

The Observer also reported that Tony Juniper, executive director of the activist group Friends of the Earth, those comments were "extremely retrograde and dangerous", and that a Blair's spokesman denied that the PM's comments signal the end of Kyoto.

The British Greens needed twelve days as well for their shock to register. PM Blair's re-marks in New York City "represent a complete U-turn from earlier speeches, in which the Prime Minister pledged support for the Kyoto Protocol" said Caroline Lucas, British Green Party MEP warning that "the U-turn threatens future global co-operation to tackle the problem."

However, a quick internet search reveals that the European public had to rely on their blogging communities, CFACT Europe's European EcoMonitor or the German Maxeiner-Miersch-website. if they wanted to know more about latest developments in climate politics. Major news companies in Germany, Poland, Sweden, France, Italy and other countries refused at all to report the death of Kyoto - if Blair maintains his new approach at the upcoming COP 11 world climate conference in Montreal in November.

Agence France Presse, the leading French news agency, only reported of celebrities attending the meeting and of "roundtable discussions on relations between Islam and the West" and "how to finance clean energy and investment in the developing world". Peace! Says the aging hippie journalist. As well Associated Press, another major supplier to European media ignored PM Blair's statements while quoting Ex-President Clintons demands for "setting up some sort of insurance structure" for venture capital investments in the Middle East.

Of all German periodicals, only the Swiss Chemische Rundschau, a special interest magazine for chemists, reported in time. Spiegel, Germany's most important news magazine, only men-tioned on 1 October in a general article on the climate debate after "Katrina", that the future of the Kyoto treaty "is currently completely uncertain. If reports in the British papers are true, the treaty could soon suffer a major loss of political support. According to the reports, British Prime Minister Tony Blair has completed a radical about-face when it comes to climate protection" - as if Blair had spoken behind closed doors.

This ignorance was also observed by James Pinkerton of TechCentralStration: "These words from Blair, addressing an audience of a thousand at the Sheraton just a few blocks north of Times Square, failed to get any pickup in the media. Even The New York Times, published just down the street, ran a story that dwelt on the star power in the room, including King Abdullah of Jordan, Jesse Jackson, and George Stephanopoulos. "Isn't this awesome?" said one participant, and those words seemed to reflect fully the Times' take on the event.

For its part The Washington Post offered this bland headline: "Clinton Gathers World Lead-ers Nonpartisan Conference Focuses on Global Improvement," making no mention of Blair's global warming remarks. As for TV coverage, there wasn't much of that either; on CNN Head-line News, Christi Paul said, admiringly, "former President Clinton is still looking to get things done," noting that Clinton garnered "more than $200 million in pledges" to address world prob-lems."

British climate expert Professor Philip Stott asked why the UK media was "in denial over politics of climate change" and reported that the section of a "typically-clear interview" Professor S. Fred Singer did for BBC-4, in which he quoted Tony Blair's ("whom we much admire") state-ments from the Clinton New York conference, "where he pulled the plug on Kyoto", was cut from the final broadcast. Singer: "The BBC guy didn't like this at all."

According to Stott, "this is all extremely illuminating. Much of the British media has in-vested enormous amounts of uncritical, emotional, soggy 'left' capital in support of the Kyoto Protocol over the last ten or so years. They have too willingly failed to apply critical journalism to the politics of climate change, with far too many commentators and news broadcasters allowing their own prejudices (not to mention their innate anti-Americanism - Mr. Blair is right about this too!) show.

Now, to their horror, these soggy left 'Green' pundits are finding themselves abandoned by the world, and they are sounding more and more shrill (and extremely shallow). They are in-creasingly in denial, often failing to pick up on the plate tectonic shifts in climate-change politics that have been slowly accumulating around the globe - shifts which that Tony Blair, the ever-consummate politician, has more astutely grasped.

Anyone with even a smattering of understanding concerning the international politics of climate change knows that the Kyoto Protocol has been moribund for some time. The world has moved on, shifted to the Pacific Rim, to technological solutions, and away from the 'command-and-control', socialistic, Old European formulae. The issues now (correctly) focus on energy, and on world energy needs, for growing economies. As Mr. Blair himself admitted in Manhattan, no country is going to opt for reduced growth, especially China and India - and most certainly not a UK under Mr. Gordon Brown."

This media behavior towards PM Blair is unusual as he did not exactly speak in a private circle: The initial meeting of the Clinton Initiative was addressed by presidents Olusegun Oba-sanjo of Nigeria and Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, World Bank chief Paul Wolfowitz, Israeli deputy prime minister Shimon Peres, US special envoy James Wolfensohn and another former US peace broker Dennis Ross, tycoons George Soros and Rupert Murdoch, head of the Irish Republican party Sinn Fein Gerry Adams, intellectuals like Nobel prize winner Elie Wiesel and Queen Rania of Jordan.

As the Washington Post adds, the inaugural meeting of the Clinton initiative stretched over three days of seminars and speeches. Each of the 800 official attendees paid $15,000 for a seat and required to commit to doing something to improve the world. More than 50 commitments have been made, totaling more than $300 million. Clinton announced four specific commitments which included a $100 million Africa investment fund and a plan to fight HIV-AIDS. One com-mitment ironic - was made by the Clinton initiative itself - a pledge that all of its activities would be "carbon neutral".