Heather Hamilton is Vice President of Programs and Sam Stein is the Edward Rawson Communications Fellow at Citizens for Global Solutions, a grassroots membership organization dedicated to bringing nations together and strengthening democratic global institutions.
One would have excused Prime Minister Tony Blair if he had refocused the G8 Summit on the issue of terrorism following Thursday's tragic bombings in London. But the fact that he didn't is as significant as any agreement that came out of the meetings.
In remaining steadfast to his G8 agenda, Prime Minister Blair reaffirmed the importance of international cooperation on issues beyond the obviously deserving fight against terror. Now more than ever, Blair's actions suggested, we must work together to solve all, not some, of those problems facing humanity that no nation can solve alone.
Blair's commitment to the G8 issues should be commended. Unfortunately, while the prime minister continued to broker progress on a range of global crises—despite the crisis in London—President Bush seemed unwilling to forge an international consensus on anything beyond terrorism. The president's resistance on climate change was particularly disheartening.
Even before the Summit was interrupted by the London attacks, President Bush had made well known his reluctance to find common ground on global warming. In an interview with Tonight with Trevor McDonald , he declared that if an international agreement on climate change was generated by the G8, and "looks like Kyoto, the answer is no." The solidarity that followed the London bombings did little to remove these objections. President Bush did sign on to a broader statement acknowledging that climate change is a reality, and called on countries to augment efforts to solve the problem through new technologies. But when it came to actual action—to following the near-universally supported strategy of lowering carbon dioxide emissions—the president remained myopically opposed.
Such inflexibility is damaging for a number of reasons. For starters, the president, like the Roman emperor Nero, is stubbornly playing the fiddle as the world burns around him. A recent gathering of environmental experts in the United Kingdom confirmed that climate change is contributing to massive displacement and migration from coastal areas around the world, extreme weather, and the eventual diminishment of agricultural productivity. And according to a study by the World Health Organization and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the ancillary effects of climate change, such as malaria and malnutrition, are causing approximately 160,000 deaths each year—more than terrorism.
Equally damaging is the message that the Bush administration is sending to the world community. While Prime Minister Blair and others offer their support in combating terrorism, the war in Iraq and other global challenges—often against the wishes of their own constituents—President Bush refuses to be a team player. Quite to the contrary, he goes out of the way to tell his British consigliore that he should expect no "quid pro quo" on environmental matters.
In contrast to Blair's commitment to the G8 agenda, Bush's resistance paints the U.S. as non-attentive, perhaps even uncaring, of world problems beyond terrorism. Bush should recognize that climate change is for many nations what terrorism is to America: a grave and growing threat. Prime Minister Koizumi of Japan, for one, has declared that despite potential economic setbacks, "it is vital that all countries strive for the reduction of greenhouse gases." In February 2004, Canadian Environment Minister David Anderson called climate change a bigger threat than terrorism. Likewise, UK Chief Science Advisor David King said that climate change is "the most severe problem that we are facing today - more serious even than the threat of terrorism."
If the Bush Administration wants to win long-term alliances among these world leaders, secretly deleting their language from G8 documents, as The Observer reported, is not the way to do it. Instead, President Bush should apply to climate change and other global issues the same kind of commitment and clarity of purpose with which he executes his vision for combating terrorism.
The bottom line is: forging an international consensus on the environment is a fundamental U.S. foreign policy interest. Not only will it win America allies among the rest of the world, it will assist in our national security efforts as well. The effects of global warming do not respect national borders; American coastal cities and U.S. agricultural states stand as much to lose as do other countries. As UN Secretary General Kofi Annan declared in his UN reform agenda, In Larger Freedom, "In a world of interconnected threats and challenges, it is in each country's self-interest that all of them are addressed effectively. Hence, the cause of larger freedom can only be advanced by broad, deep and sustained global cooperation."
In sticking to his agenda at the G8 Summit in the face of indiscriminate violence and terrorism, Prime Minister Blair proved Annan correct—showing that issues such as poverty, global security, climate change and health are intertwined. President Bush would be wise to realize that while terrorism is among the world's most pressing problems, it does not exist in a vacuum. Now more than ever, world leaders must work together to solve all, not some, of those problems that no nation can solve alone.
