Ecological issues bring Europe and the USA into conflict

Before the EU Summit in Stockholm, the President of the European Commission, Romano Prodi and the Swedish Prime Minister, Goeran Person, directed a letter to the President of the United States, George Bush, in which they expressed their deep concern that the world’s climate may be seriously damaged if emission of Greenhouse Effect Gases (GEG) is not checked. To date, they have not even received the courtesy of a reply. The official joint position of the EU is that the Protocol adopted at the world ecological summit in Kyoto be implemented. This protocol aims to stipulate quotas for emission of GEG. The EU calls for an effective international action to start addressing the problem which is the continued heating of the planet. The USA has already let it be known that they are against any sort of policy adoption which would damage their economy. President Bush has already stated that there is not enough scientific knowledge to link GEG with the rising temperature. One would therefore invite President Bush to visit the United Nations building in New York and to request a copy of the report from the intergovernmental panel, in whose pages he can read that the latest scientific data from the world’s most renowned scientists indicate that human activity in the last 50 years has contributed to global warming, these activities being emission of GEG. Alternatively, he could become a regular reader of Pravda.Ru. President Bush may have his hands tied, however, by powerful lobbies in the energy sector who backed his campaign for the Presidency. The US policy of treating the environment with the same academic attitude that is shown in business administration circles, namely cost-benefit relationship, is quite absurd, since the benefits in this case are not a bottom-line figure but rather, the bottom-line health of the planet. If the world’s greatest producer of GEG selfishly decides that it is not going to do anything because its economy will suffer, being at the same time the richest nation on Earth, Mankind as an animal evidently has a lot of evolving to do and certain specimens make the rest of us ashamed to be human. In the next ecological conference in June of this year, the American representative is likely to get another pie in his face.

TIMOTHY BANCROFT-HINCHEY PRAVDA.Ru LISBON