President Bush will encounter both praise and protest at a summit of the leading industrial nations this week as he raises the American ante for African aid but yields no ground on the contentious question of global warming.
In the run-up to the summit at a remote resort in Scotland, Bush gradually has acceded to part of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s challenge for a doubling of aid to Africa.
But Bush has proved far less willing to negotiate Blair’s second main challenge to the Group of Eight industrialized nations: Containment of pollution that could be changing the world’s climate.
The United States alone among the G-8 nations has refused to embrace the Kyoto Protocol for pollution control. Bush maintains that its limits on the emission of pollutants some scientists associate with global warming could choke the U.S. economy and impede the progress of developing nations.
For Blair, a third-term leader facing discontent at home, the combination of growing generosity and intransigence by his American counterpart presents something less than victory at a time when Blair is struggling to assert his agenda on the world stage. He is likely to tout the summit’s achievements on African aid while soft-pedaling its inaction on global warming.
For Bush, who is making his fourth journey to Europe this year with a commitment to repair trans-Atlantic relations strained by the war in Iraq, the dispute over global warming alone will be enough to stir huge public protests at a staging area in nearby Edinburgh. Africa aid, for which musicians such as Bono and Bob Geldolf are rallying support, and global warming stir greater attention and the potential for demonstrations in Europe than they do in the U.S. Activists gathered Sunday at “alternative summits” at Edinburgh, denouncing as insufficient G-8 plans for Africa.
“For Bush, unlike Blair . . . the political risks are greater than the possible gains,” said Philip Gordon, director of the Center on the U.S. and Europe at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “The risk is that the headlines after the summit are not that the U.S. doubles foreign aid. It’s that the U.S. again is dragging its feet on global warming.”
Preparations for the summit already have generated a significant agreement among the leaders assembling Wednesday at the Gleneagles resort in northern Scotland. The world’s richest nations have agreed to forgive about $40 billion in debt owed by 18 of the world’s poorest nations, including 14 in Africa.
Experts: Africa needs more
Yet that relief falls far short of meeting the needs of African nations plagued by poverty, disease and famine, experts say. The agreement will spare the 14 African nations from paying a total of about $1billion a year in debt service to the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the African Development Bank.
By contrast, Blair has challenged G-8 nations to double their annual aid to Africa to $25billion by 2010 and then double it again by 2015. European nations in the group–Britain, Germany, France and Italy–have agreed, as has Japan. The other G-8 nations are Russia, Canada and the United States.
Until last week, the Bush administration was reluctant to commit to any specific increase. But then, with an announcement that he will ask Congress for $1.2 billion for a five-year plan to combat malaria in sub-Saharan Africa, Bush pledged to double U.S. aid to Africa by 2010, basing that on a benchmark of $4.3 billion in 2004.
The malaria plan mirrors another five-year pledge of $15 billion that Bush made in 2003 to fight AIDS in Africa, with the State Department saying just over 200,000 people now are getting treatment in a program aimed at reaching 2 million.
As part of his newest pledge, Bush also has promised $400million to train a half-million teachers and provide scholarships for 300,000 students, mostly girls, in a region where more than half of all girls never graduate from primary schools.
While Bush’s moves on Africa have drawn praise, even from critics, some maintain that the U.S. does not always follow through on promises.
Bush “has done something that he has refused to do up until now. He has committed to a specific number,” said Susan Rice, a foreign policy expert at Brookings. But “we have a pattern established of ambitious rhetoric not always followed with ambitious follow-through.”
The president has promised far less on the question of global warming.
Blair is asking the G-8 leaders for consensus on the science of climate change: An agreement that carbon emissions are causing global warming. He wants them to set hard standards for reducing such emissions and also wants to draw the developing economies of China, India, Brazil, Mexico and others into voluntary agreements.
But Bush has rejected the Kyoto Protocol, and the administration maintains that emissions already are being reduced each year in the U.S.
“The best way to help nations develop while limiting pollution and improving public health is to promote technologies for generating energy that are clean, affordable and secure,” Bush said last week in announcing his initiatives for Africa.
“Some have suggested the best solution to environmental challenges and climate change is to oppose development and put the world on an energy diet,” Bush said. “But at this moment, about 2 billion people have no access to any form of modern energy. Blocking that access would condemn them to permanent poverty.”
The Bush administration maintains that emission controls alone are not a solution to averting climate change, and Blair has all but conceded he never will win Bush’s concession on that question.
U.S. stand on climate change
“It’s not just climate change,” said National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley. “It is climate change, it is pollution, it is poverty alleviation. It is energy. These are some interrelated challenges that we face, for which we have to take action. I think you’re going to see the G-8 talking in those terms.”
The G-8 nations have been talking about climate change since 1990, when President George H.W. Bush played host to the summit in Houston.
“We are committed to undertake common efforts to limit emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide,” the joint communique from that summit said. “We recognize the importance of working together to develop new technologies and methods over the coming decades.”
Fifteen years later, the G-8 communique from Scotland may not sound much different on the issue of global warming.
Charles Kupchan, director of European studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, suggested that Bush’s willingness to work at repairing the U.S. relationship with Europe should help at the summit. At the same time, he noted, Europe is consumed with its inability to ratify a European Union constitution.
If the summit produces little to show the world for relief from climate change, many suggest, the G-8 leaders at least should emerge from Scotland with something to show for Africa.
Looking at “the political landscape that the G-8 leaders will be meeting on,” Kupchan said, “we do have before us an opportunity for cooperation on several issues that have been lacking over the last several years.”
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mdsilva@tribune.com
