Disgrace at The Hague.

In late November, the United States earned international censure for its behavior during the global warming talks at The Hague in the Netherlands. It made such unreasonable demands that the negotiations broke up. As a result; the Kyoto Protocol, the 1992 agreement to cut greenhouse gases by 7 percent below 1990 levels, may be trashed.

Washington came to the talks loaded with proposals that would allow U.S. companies to continue polluting.

It insisted on receiving credits for forests and farmland and for paying developing countries to plant trees, arguing that trees absorb enough carbon dioxide to offset polluting industries. It also demanded emissions credit trading, whereby it could purchase, and store indefinitely, credits from those countries that pollute less, a plan that Ross Gelbspan, author of The Heat Is On: The Climate Crisis, The Cover-Up, The Prescription (Perseus Books, 1998), calls "dubious and inequitable."

"Refusing to cave under U.S. pressure, the Europeans insisted that the United States could meet no more than 50 percent of its obligation by these methods," writes Gelbspan in an op-ed column for the Progressive Media Project. "The result was a flameout of the talks."

The United States quickly lost credibility around the world.

"The actions of the United States delegation at the global climate conference in The Hague are a disgrace. The representatives of the most polluting nation on Earth have effectively thwarted modest measures which would have helped their own citizens as well as everyone else," said The Herald of Glasgow, Scotland, in a November 27 editorial headlined, "Staggering Selfishness: America Jealously Guards Her Right to Pollute."

"`You've sunk the world,' shouted furious protesters gathering outside the conference," reported Reuters News Service.

"`Build higher and wider dikes,' was Greenpeace's advice to the world's rich, heavily polluting countries, after the collapse," reported Canada's Southam News Service.

"The world will pay the price in tears," announced the Friends of the Earth.

"Nigeria's environment minister, Sani Zangon Daura, said the United States had caused a `plague of climate change' as harmful as the colonization of Africa," reported the Los Angeles Times. "A delegate representing low-lying island nations already being flooded because of global warming fumed, `We are fighting for our livelihood, and they, the U.S., are fighting about a change in lifestyle.'"

Some environmentalists, like Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature (Doubleday, 1990), blame the American public. "Even if the Europeans hadn't stood tough," he wrote in the on-line environmental magazine Grist, "the document wouldn't have made it through the Senate. Not with George W. Bush as President, and not with Al Gore as President. And the reason is simple: The American public still does not believe with the necessary passion that climate change represents a problem serious enough to require any compromises in our way of life." For McKibben, much of the American public has fallen asleep to a lullaby of plenty.

"One of the ironies of the entire global warming debate is that America--chief contributor to the problem--is geographically situated in such a way that it will be one of the last places to feel the pain," McKibben argues. Except for Florida and a few other states on the Gulf of Mexico, he says, "Our shorelines are not especially vulnerable, nothing like Bangladesh or the small island states or the Nile Delta. Sure, we've had some floods and hurricanes, but we're a vast and rich land, and we recover easily, at least for now. Drought over one set of fields is usually offset somewhere else in the grain belt. That won't help us much when the temperature really climbs, as every computer model now predicts, but so far the public is not scared enough to make it an issue, something that our politicians instinctively realize."

That apathy, as many environmentalists have noted, is strongly tied to a successful disinformation campaign conducted by big business over the last decade. Though the denial that climate change is happening has been refuted by a growing scientific consensus, much of the U.S. public still believes there are big questions about whether or not the Earth is heating up.

By contrast, in some European nations, public sentiment is strongly behind reforms to slow climate change, a phenomenon reflected in public policy, with Britain planning to cut its emissions by 60 percent over the next fifty years, Holland by 80 percent, and Germany by 50 percent.

Given the U.S. apathy, it is worthwhile to review some of the unsettling information presented to the delegates at The Hague.

The U.N. weather agency announced that heat deaths are expected to double in the next twenty years as the result of global warming if nothing is done to slow or stop it.

"Heat waves are expected to become a major killer," said Godwin Obasi, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization.

The organization Redefining Progress told the delegates that poor and minority people worldwide would suffer the most as the result of climate change. "Buried beneath the headlines on global warming is this harsh reality: The heat deaths, infectious diseases, respiratory illnesses, and economic dislocations that result will harm low-income people and communities of color the most," said Joanne Kliejunas, executive director of the group, which is based in Oakland.

Andrew Dlugolecki, a director of CGNU, one of the world's largest insurance companies, informed the conference that climate change would bankrupt the global economy by 2065.

A leaked draft report from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is composed of more than 2,000 scientists, says that climate change is now expected to be much worse than predicted--more extreme than the world has experienced since the last Ice Age ended--with shifts in average global temperature on the order of eleven degrees. It also concluded, "there is now stronger evidence for human influence" on the disruption of weather patterns.

Bob Watson, chair of the panel, told The Hague conference that "potentially tens of millions of people" would lose their homes as a result of a change in sea levels.

The U.S. Government can no longer shirk its responsibility. It should begin by agreeing to the Kyoto Protocol, rather than scuttling it.

But as many environmentalists argue, the Kyoto Protocol is only a small beginning. While the agreement would require cuts in emission levels to 7 percent below 1990 levels, only cuts of 70 percent or more would be enough to start a reversal of climate change, GelbslSan and others point out.

So the United States should take steps right away to drastically reduce its output of greenhouse gases. For starters, it should shift national subsidies away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy sources and the retraining of coal miners and other workers whose livelihoods are affected, says Gelbspan in an article in The American Prospect.

He also says industrial governments should be required to follow a "progressively more stringent fossil-fuel-efficiency standard."

For Gelbspan, the choice is obvious: extreme poverty, mass famine, and displaced populations, or "a worldwide energy transition that not only would allow the global climate to restabilize, but would substantially expand the stability, equity, and wealth of the global economy."

The verdict is in on the collapse of the talks at The Hague: The United States needs to get with the times. Or it, like the rest of this beautiful, plentiful, polluted planet, is finished.