YOU PROBABLY DON’T HEAR A LOT about global warming these days. But then, you probably don’t live in the Republic of Maldives. Maumoon Abdul Gayoom does — he’s the president of the Maldives, in fact — and last week at the second United Nations Earth Summit in New York, he explained what global warming means to him and to his island nation. If the planet continues to heat up at current rates, said Gayoom in a speech delivered in the U.N.’s General Assembly hall, the Maldives will become a modern Atlantis, “totally submerged” by the run-off from melting polar ice caps. By the time the U.N. holds its next environmental conference, Gayoom warned, his country may be but a soggy memory.
Faced with such a grim prognosis, an ordinary world leader might have been tempted simply to give up, accept the inevitable, and buy a glass-bottomed boat. Not Maumoon Abdul Gayoom. There is a solution to the looming crisis of global warming, Gayoom told the assembled delegates, a way not only to stem the rising tide of the earth’s oceans and save the Maldives, but an opportunity to create in the process “a shared, a just, a prospering people’s world.” How can it be done? It won’t be easy. The Maldives will need more ” resource mobilization,” additional “technology transfer,” dramatically increased “capacity building for the promotion of sustainable development,” not to mention a strong dose of “global cooperation.” In other words, said President Gayoom, the Republic of Maldives is going to need a whole lot more foreign-aid money from the United States.
Gayoom’s speech came at an odd time in the history of the global-warming debate. Five years after global warming became an international cause at the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, there is still no scientific consensus that the phenomenon even exists. Indeed, new data seem to show that parts of the planet (there is no “global” climate) are actually cooling off. Of the studies that support the rising temperature thesis, at least one credibly suggests that global warming will cause ocean levels to drop, through incre
ased evaporation and snowfall over the poles. The Maldives might be safe after all.
But no matter. Global warming, real or not, is a potential cash cow for many Third World nations. Countries like Kiribati, Nauru, Vanuatu, Tuvalu, and Palau, none of them a major player on the world stage, are nonetheless signatories to the U.N. Convention on Climate Change. Participation in the Convention makes it possible for a poor nation to receive U.N. money to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, while requiring it to do or pay virtually nothing in return. Meanwhile, countries like the United States and . . . well, mostly the United States, get to foot the bill.
It’s not a bad deal if you’re a backward, povertystricken country with an egregious pollution record — known in U.N. parlance as a “developing nation” — and throughout the summit, delegates from the Third World took to the podium to follow the Maldives Model. Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, demanded “international cooperation” with his country, “particularly in the areas of trade, debt relief, provision of financial resources and technology transfer.” Saifuddin Soz, the Indian minister of environment and forests, also called for more cash, while denouncing “efforts to prescribe equal obligations and liabilities on unequal players” — in other words, efforts to force India to pay its share of the bill. His Excellency Sir Cuthbert Sebastian, the head of state of St. Kitts and Nevis, requested immediate ” contributions” from the “developed world.” It went on like this, speaker after speaker, day after day, for a week, an unending shakedown conducted entirely in diplomatic euphemisms.
Only Cuba, one of the few countries with no hope of getting American aid, strayed from the drill. The president of the Cuban national assembly, Ricardo Alarcon, attacked “international cooperation” as “an empty phrase,” a statement about as close to blasphemy as anyone at the summit dared get. Alarcon went on to blast the United States as single-handedly “responsible for the destruction of the environment,” a country motivated by “insane selfishness” and “capitalist greed” that “accumulated its wealth by exploiting the Third World.” After hours of listening to speakers wax rhapsodic about the “framework of common but differentiated responsibilities,” of leafing through U.N. publications with titles like “Gender Equality and Water Resources Management: Five Years After Rio,” a reporter found Alarcon’s old-fashioned Communist diatribe surprisingly fresh, even revolutionary. (His fellow diplomats apparently did, too; they gave Alarcon a noticeably enthusiastic round of applause.)
The Earth Summit held few surprises, but one of them was Al Gore. Gore, who through his book Earth in the Balance and his role as head of the Senate delegation to Rio in 1992 did more than perhaps any other person to hype global warming, was almost invisible at the summit. After delivering a short, tepid speech on the first day of the conference, Gore went back to Washington and stayed quiet. At the end of the day, it was Tony Blair, not Gore, who came away sounding the most like the Gore of old. “I speak to you not just as the new British prime minister, but as a father,” Blair said, looking misty. Later in his speech, Blair, in classic Gore fashion, observed that although ” it takes less than an hour to fell a tree, it can take a lifetime to replace it.”
Gore wasn’t just missing in action at the Earth Summit. His low profile has extended to other environmental questions as well. During the recent debate over tighter air-quality standards, Gore offered not a single public word of encouragement to his former protegee, EPA administrator Carol Browner. Indeed, on at least two occasions, Gore’s staff leaked word to reporters that the vice president’s office was “furious” with Browner for not consulting with Gore before proposing such rigorous new standards. Gore’s anger stretches credulity — he would have been aware of any new air-quality proposals long before they became public — but he clearly thinks he needs to distance himself from Browner. The air-pollution standards outraged a number of important Democratic interests, including unions and a number of big-city mayors, and Gore can’t afford to seem too green.
Gore’s sudden change of heart hasn’t gone unnoticed by environmentalists. In a recent New York Times article, the heads of both the League of Conservation Voters and the Environmental Information Center implied that Gore has betrayed the cause for political reasons. It is a view that is certain to be articulated by former Gore allies more often in months to come. Gore is “cynically manipulating the environmental movement,” says Pranay Gupte, editor of the Earth Times, which published a daily edition at the summit. “He’s been seen to be the great ozone man, though I think people are now beginning to realize that with Gore there is less than meets the eye.”
Tucker Carlson is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
