By Michael Hasty

W is for Warming

Those who thought there was a significant difference between the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates on environmental issues must have been disturbed by the process that went on at the international climate negotiations in the Netherlands a couple of months ago.

While Americans were waiting to see who would emerge from the Florida fiasco as their next president, the Clinton/Gore administration’s representatives at The Hague conference left Earth hanging in the balance. The negotiations at The Hague were intended to establish a framework for implementing the 1997 Kyoto treaty on climate change. But the international representatives were unable to reach agreement on a plan. America’s position, that forests and farmlands that absorb carbon (carbon "sinks") should count as credits that would offset the need for reducing fossil fuel emissions, was unacceptable to all but a few other nations. An attempt to reconvene the talks a few weeks later also collapsed in the face of American intransigence.

The polluter-friendly nature of the US position becomes obvious when you consider that it would have allowed this country to actually increase its carbon dioxide emissions to meet the terms of the Kyoto agreement. The fact that a Democratic administration could advance this position, without any fear of igniting a political backlash from its own environmentalist constituency, speaks volumes about the state of politics and the control of information in our "corporate democracy" -- the term Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold uses to describe the American political system.

What is even more disturbing is that this position was taken by the major political party regarded as being "pro-environment"; and future climate negotiations will be conducted by "anti-environment" Republicans. God help us all.

In only one of the three presidential debates did the subject of global climate change -- perhaps the greatest challenge confronting the world’s governments -- even get into the discussion. Republican candidate George W. Bush took that opportunity to raise questions about the science behind global warming. This is an extreme position even in the oil industry, which at least pays lip service to recognizing that there is a climate problem (a recent ad campaign by British Petroleum suggests that its BP initials stand for "beyond petroleum"). But Bush’s gaffe went largely unremarked upon by the corporate media -- whose pro-Bush bias, especially in the last month of the campaign, has been well documented in several studies.

Of course the connections between the Bush family and the oil industry have been no secret. Like his father before him, George W went into the oil business as a young man; and the entire Bush inner circle was able to capitalize big time on its Middle East contacts following the Persian Gulf War (which, contrary to Papa Bush’s denials at the time, turned out to be about "blood for oil" after all).

But when Green party candidate Ralph Nader described the younger Bush as "a corporation disguised as a person," it’s doubtful that most people recognized what an accurate characterization that was -- or exactly to what degree the corporation’s board of directors is dominated by oil interests.

A recent article in the Washington Post details how the incoming Bush administration is structured like a corporate hierarchy, with George W as chairman of the board, and Dick Cheney exercising unprecedented power (for a vice-president) as the administration’s CEO. Cheney brings to the job his experience from his last five years as CEO of Halliburton Corporation, the world’s largest oil services firm. The chairman of Bush’s presidential campaign, Don Evans, who’s been nominated as Secretary of Commerce, is also an oil business executive. Bush’s designated chief of staff, Andrew Card, was the leading representative of the auto industry at the Kyoto conference. And when Bush needed somebody to do his dirty work in Florida, he turned to oilman and slick corporate lawyer James Baker.

Conspiracy theorists can have a field day speculating on the ways the oil industry might have manipulated the economy to benefit its candidate for president. One of the biggest stories of the year was the sudden steep rise in oil prices, which reached their peak just before the election. This was a win-win situation for the industry. Not only did W benefit from the shock to the wallets of disgruntled voters, but oil companies made record profits. Chevron, for example, netted $4 billion in profits in the third quarter alone.

This story went largely unexplored by mainstream media. When gas prices in the key battleground states of the Midwest spiked early last summer, to a point significantly higher than the national average, the Federal Trade Commission announced it was going to investigate. But within a couple of weeks, gas prices in the Midwest were significantly lower than the national average. Yet there was never any follow-up or investigation by journalists, and industry explanations for this remarkable reversal were accepted at face value.

You have to ask: could the media’s inattention to the possible implications here have anything to do with the fact that oil and automobile companies are the largest corporations in the world, and spend billions of dollars annually on both print and broadcast advertising? Could this also be why the announcement by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- which reported in October that its computer models were indicating that global temperature increase in the next century would be almost double their earlier projections -- was buried by the media? It seems curious.

Bush’s cabinet appointments to the crucial positions of Secretary of the Interior and Director of the Environmental Protection Agency likewise bode ill for the environment. Both nominees have a history of supporting the incoming administration’s preferred environmental policy of letting industry voluntarily regulate itself.

The nominee for Interior secretary, Gale Norton, has years of experience working for the legal arm of the reactionary "Wise Use" movement. She was a protege of Ronald Reagan’s notorious Secretary of the Interior, James Watt, who believed that since the Second Coming of Jesus was at hand, there was no sense trying to preserve any natural resources. His solution for the problem of ozone depletion was for everybody to wear hats. Norton has long advocated opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska for oil drilling, a policy Bush endorsed in his campaign. This is shaping up to be the first major environmental battle of the new administration.

Christine Todd Whitman, Bush’s designated EPA director, although widely viewed as a moderate, actually has a fairly conservative, record on environmental issues. Her environmental motto as governor of New Jersey has been, "Open for Business." She cut the state’s environmental protection budget by almost a third; abolished the office of environmental prosecutor; relaxed enforcement; and, like Bush in Texas, promoted voluntary environmental compliance and self-regulation.

The Bush administration promises to be a government of Exxon/Mobil, for Texaco, and by Enron (George W’s biggest lifetime political contributor). It will be a government whose deliberations will be indistinguishable from those of an oil company boardroom -- driven by arrogance of power and ignorance of science.

For those of us seeking to protect a dangerously warming Earth, it will be too much like stepping out of the frying pan into the fire. It will make the Clinton years look good.