It is President George W Bush's nature to
take dramatic steps. In this he has less in common
with his father, a fan of finesse, than with
Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. He can take a
page from their book by embracing the Kyoto
Protocol.
Bush is due to meet with
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi in Kyoto
on November 15-16, in a stopover on his way to the
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Busan
in South Korea and then later to China.
Embracing the Kyoto Protocol is the only
response to the New Orleans disaster that would be
convincing. The damages already
come to
hundreds of billions of dollars. The costs of
Kyoto to the US economy, though real, pale before
the cost of repeated Katrinas.
And that is
the prospect presented by warming oceans, which
strengthen tropical storms. Nearly all Americans
have by now learned about this causal connection.
Few believe any longer that the increase in
extreme weather events is just coincidence.
Even in Washington, one can sense a change
in mood in environmental-skeptic circles. Already,
after the invasion of Iraq, high gas prices and
concerns about subsidizing Islamic regimes led to
green trends among conservative enviro-skeptics.
Dramatic gestures Katrina
brought this trend to critical mass. People are
ready for a change. Enviro-skeptics may not be
pushing for Kyoto, but if their leader leads, they
will follow. And their leader is George W Bush.
The Bush administration needs a dramatic
gesture to show it is coping with the new scale of
disaster, but not by rebuilding New Orleans -
something already widely seen as a mistake - but
by addressing the sources of weather extremism.
The cost of prevention The costs
of prevention are great, and for a long time we
can at best only slow the growth of the problem,
but the costs are visibly greater if we go on not
even trying to slow that growth and instead limit
ourselves to consequence management.
At
Kyoto Bush needs to say that, in the face of the
costs already incurred from a warming Gulf of
Mexico, the United States is changing its policy
on Kyoto, and announce a carefully calibrated gas
tax to show he's serious.
He might still
want to say that Kyoto has to be modified, but he
should turn "modified" into a code word for
strengthening, not ignoring it. It is clear, for
example, that the world needs increasing controls
on developing country emissions.
It would
be like if Reagan who, having denounced Strategic
Arms Limitations Talks - a treaty between the
United States and the former Soviet Union that
froze a number of offensive weapons - came back to
arms control by upping the ante on it with
Strategic Arms Reductions Talks, a treaty between
the United States and the Soviet Union that
limited each other's warhead supplies.
The right kind of leader Bush
would be able to deliver the Republican vote and
with it the United States. He would lead an
America that, despite previous bitter Republican
opposition to Kyoto, would be basically united in
supporting it.
He would thus act as the
kind of leader Nixon proved to be when he led a
unified United States on renewing relations with
China, despite previous sharp opposition to any
such thing.
Nixon was the greatest
tactical mind among Republican politicians of the
last generation, Reagan the strongest strategist.
They believed in doing the dramatic thing,
reshuffling the whole deck when the cards had
started coming up unplayable - as they have been
for Bush after Katrina.
It was advice
Nixon gave to former president George H W Bush
when the latter was sinking politically. But
George H W Bush preferred to stay inside his
comfort zone - and drown.
Hitting
back George W Bush is brasher. He enjoys
hitting back. His father spoke of waiting and
seeing, fearing to "make the wrong mistake". But
George W Bush prefers to feel decisive. He likes
to answer a big blow with a punch on the same
scale.
He overran Afghanistan in response
to September 11. He likes policy reversals that
match the scope of geopolitical change. He
approached Russia to become an ally after
September 11, despite having run on an anti-Russia
platform.
In Kyoto, Bush could present it
that way - and avoid looking like a fraud.
He could, of course, just go on repeating
slogans about how some scientists are unsure about
whether global warming is real, or - the current
line of retreat - whether humans are the cause of
it, or at least whether humans are the main cause
of it. Or that it's all a long natural cycle, the
planet was just as warm, or warmer, 10,000 years
ago.
These slogans are beginning to look
painfully irrelevant. But there was no New Orleans
to be destroyed 10,000 years ago. Modern coastal
cities and infrastructures and interdependencies
were not around then. The hunter-gatherers could
relocate relatively easily. Those who drowned were
replaceable units, quickly forgotten.
If
it were really true that the warming had entirely
natural causes, we would respond to it as a threat
from nature, just like avian flu or the asteroid
threat. It is only in a non-logical polemical
mode, a sort of inverted environmentalist
fundamentalism, which people say, "The causes are
natural so we shouldn't do anything about it."
Global warming and its effects The normal human response would be to go on a
crash course to find technologies to cool down the
earth, stop nature from cooking us out and keep
the environment steady for the long term - steady
enough to accommodate modern civilizations and
populations.
In reality, of course, the
human contributory causes are significant, whether
or not they add up to 50% of the problem. There
are things that can be done immediately to reduce
them. In a normal frame of mind, we would be
pursuing them now, alongside longer-term projects
such as technologies for cooling and stabilizing
the planet.
Alternative
options The alternative is to dump more and
more hundreds of billions into more and more
repairs, in a pointless act of mimicking Sisyphean
labor.
And to go to Iran and Venezuela,
begging for more oil? Take a hard look at that
option. Going to Kyoto is the easier way out.
Ira Straus is a founder and US
coordinator of the Committee on Eastern Europe and
Russia in NATO.
