Tyler Hammer

The Badger Herald

University of Wisconsin

Earth Day & the day when people locally, nationally and worldwide join hands to celebrate their common earth heritage and renew their devotion to the protection of our planet.

Or is it? With the passing of Earth Day on April 22, I couldn’t help but feel that we here in Madison and the United States missed the boat. This stems from the fact that the rest of the world collectively celebrated Earth Day not last Sunday, but over a month ago.

Back on March 21, the United Nations Peace Bell rang to mark the 30th anniversary of Earth Day’s founding in 1971. Fittingly, March 21 is the global equipoise, the day every nation experiences a twelve-hour day and night. In this way, the equinox serves to symbolize the sense of unity and collective commitment to the care of our planet that Earth Day is all about. In hindsight, I find it no big surprise that we here in the United States are out of step on this global event.

We always seem to have our own agenda in mind, just as President Bush had his own agenda in mind when he rejected the Kyoto Protocol on March 13, thereby draining any hope of reaching a global agreement for the reduction of greenhouse-gas emissions in the near future.

The Kyoto Protocol was the draft of an internationally commissioned treaty intended to be a stepping stone to seriously address the problem of global warming. It stood as a symbol by which nations the world over were to collectively work toward global betterment. Every other nation agreed to the terms of the treaty only to find that President Bush decided to bag it.

This cop-out by the Bush administration unleashed considerable anti-Americanism within Europe, as Europeans view the curbing of global warming as a fundamental necessity & something far more important than even foot-and-mouth disease. Bush justified his rejection of the treaty with two claims.

First, he alleged that implementation would be too costly to our already stumbling U.S. economy. Secondly, he claimed that the state of scientific knowledge of the causes of and solutions to global climate change is incomplete.

Bush’s first assertion is misleading, for it must be noted that he cited a report done by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) to support his “too costly” claim. That report was commissioned by Rep. McIntosh (R-Ind.), who has long been known as a skeptic of global warming. Moreover, of the five recent reports done to assess the impact of multi-pollutant reductions, only the EIA concluded there would be considerable harm to the economy. Other studies, including one by the Environmental Protection Agency, concluded costs would be quite reasonable.

I would have to agree with Bush’s second claim, that there is no scientific proof that humans are inducing global warming. However, it is unlikely scientific proof will ever directly link human emissions of greenhouse gases to global climate change & the system is simply too complex. Nevertheless, reasonable correlations can be drawn. For instance, global temperature has increased more in the last century (the century of unprecedented industrial pollution) than any other 100-year time span in the past 10,000 years. For threats as serious as those posed by global warming, the precautionary principle must be put into effect.

Given the severity of the plausible threats associated with global warming, scientific proof that no harm is forthcoming ought to be provided for action not to be taken. This is exactly what the Kyoto Protocol represented. Let me remind you that President Bush and Mr. Dick Cheney made over $30 million last year alone from their connections with the oil industry. It doesn’t take super-computer climate model to recognize a connection here. Implementation of the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol might seriously cut profits for the oil industry.

All this aside, the fact that Bush rejected the Kyoto Protocol itself doesn’t concern me. Kyoto alone isn’t the solution as it excluded 80 percent of the world from compliance, including major pollution centers such as China and India. What concerns me is that Bush has the audacity to send the message to the rest of the world that they have been on a fool’s errand.

Instead of simply rejecting the treaty, the Bush administration should have kept negotiations on the table as a sign of good faith toward the rest of the world. It is time for the United States to stop putting economic growth above all else. The United States must realize this is not an Ameri-centric world.

Tyler Hammer is a junior majoring in English and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin.

The Badger Herald is UW’s independent student newspaper and is available online at http://www.badgerherald.com.