Uncle Sam’s cabin
how to ensure Pax Americana

Nothing else explains the noises the US has been making at CoP-8. First, they snarled at the Kyoto Protocol. Next, they began to purr about bilateral relationships. Now, it transpires, they not only want to keep whispering dangerous nothings into the ears of the Executive Board (EB) to the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), but are actually yelling themselves hoarse about mitigating climate change in a way that runs outside of, parallel to, the CoP process.

The eminent Dr Watson, in his press statement early in the conference, threw elementary logic and 10 years of negotiations out of the window, grandiosely stating: "Rather than making drastic reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that would put millions of Americans out of work and undermine our ability to make long-term investments in clean energy — as the Kyoto Protocol required — the President’s growth-based approach will accelerate the development of new technologies and encourage partnerships on climate change issues with the developing world."

After this announcement — arrogant, isolationist, and typically Uncle Sam — which clearly showed the US was interested in taking a different tack to climate change, the US delegation quickly got down to hardselling "the President’s new growth approach". On October 30, they met Indian foreign ministry officials at Hyderabad House. India was asked to forget the Kyoto Protocol, and sign up for bilateral relations to tackle the issue. Indian officials haven’t responded. But since Indian industry is completely gung-ho about the carbon market (in an interview to Equity Watch, K P Nyati, head of the environment management division, Confederation of Indian Industry, said: "the US has proposed bilateral projects. And if such schemes are able to mitigate GHG emissions…the entrepreuners would still go for them."), and they do wield influence with the present government, India might well tow the line in the future. Worrying, to say the least.

But we were talking about Uncle Sam. At CoP-8, a very interesting development occurred. Publicly, the US went all out against the protocol. It would never ever ratify it, they said. In so doing, it lost eligibility to participate in EB meetings. So privately, it went on a diplomatic blitzkrieg and managed to blaze its way into the EB. The rules about who could or couldn’t attend EB meetings were hitherto vague, but could be interpreted to mean that only those countries that had ratified the protocol had the right to attend EB meetings as observers. The US managed to incorporate a minor but crucial amendment: from now on, any country that was a ‘party’ to the UNFCCC, but not to the Kyoto Protocol, could attend.

Many Southern delegates and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) were surprised at this turn of events. The US had been lobbying for a seat in EB meetings for the past year, ever since it first announced its decision to pull out of the protocol in March 2001. Why did it now want only observer status? The US strategy here is clear, and horrendous. It is out of the protocol, but still wants to meddle in its workings. Talk about paranoia.

NGOs also wonder if there might be a larger gameplan behind the bilateral bandwagon the US is inviting developing countries to jump in. The US will be the common denominator in all these agreements. Could it, therefore, herd all these countries into a single bloc in the future, thus creating a parallel structure to the Kyoto Protocol?