Kyoto Caput (2001)

From the May 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

The US Government has abandoned its commitment to the Kyoto protocols for reducing greenhouse gases. As the US is responsible for 25 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, this puts the treaty in serious jeopardy.

The announcement was greeted by the usual protests from people and organisations that support capitalism but imagine that it can somehow operate in the interests of human beings and the environment.

“Without the world’s biggest polluter, the Kyoto protocol is in serious trouble,” said a spokesperson for the European Union’s environment commissioner Margot Wallstrom. Mark Helm, a spokesman for Friends of the Earth in Washington, DC said: “This is another incredibly short-sighted move on the part of the Bush administration, which is only concerned about wealthy contributors.” (New Scientist 29 March.) No doubt there is an element of pay-back by the present administration to wealthy political donors from the US fossil fuel lobby, the underlying cause however is the competitive nature of capitalism.

In view of this the Leader writer in the Observer (1 April) must have surely been struck by a particularly virulent form of April Fool Day madness when he wrote that the UK should combine with the EU to thwart US aims. “The EU with Russia, China, India and Japan could forge the climate change convention-without the US.”

“‘The President has been unequivocal,’ said George W. Bush’s spokesman Ari Fleischer on Wednesday. ‘He does not support the Kyoto treaty. It exempts the developing nations around the world, and it is not in the United States’ economic interest'” (New Scientist, 29 March).

The whole purpose of capitalist production is to make a profit, in order to do so you must cheapen production to get a bigger share of the market. The Bush administration is acting in the way that it thinks best serves US capital. They are being ruthlessly honest. Margot Wallstrom, Mark Helm, the Observer and their likes just don’t seem to get it, do they?

Richard Donnelly