Ban President Bush From the G8 PDF Print E-mail
Andy Rowell, 20 June

Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair has just made a desperate dash to try and salvage some kind of deal on climate change at the forthcoming G8 Gleneagles Summit. First came a visit to Moscow; then on to Berlin, Paris and finally on to Luxembourg before Blair flew home. All the way, Blair’s visit was overshadowed by Britain’s rebate payments to the European Union, so the issue of climate was completely sidelined.

Blair had been trying to shore up some kind of deal on climate change, one of his top priorities at the G8 Summit along with debt relief for Africa. But the biggest polluter of them all, the United States, far from signing up to any serious proposals to alleviate climate change, is doing all it can to scupper any action. In Washington last week Blair failed to persuade Bush to act. Britain’s Environment Minister, Margaret Beckett now says “there is a degree of disappointment that there isn’t more common ground” with the Bush Administration on the issue of climate.

Any deal without America is not worth the paper it is written on. Although America has only four per cent of the global population, it is responsible for 25 per cent of all carbon dioxide emissions, the main gas responsible for climate change. Every American emits nearly six tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, compared with 0.31 per Indian or 0.05 tonnes per Bangladeshi.

It is now an established fact that we are changing the climate and that man-made emissions, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, are largely to blame. Every one agrees that it is one of urgent problems we face today, that is even more serious than Al-Queda and global terrorism. Everyone that is apart from a few rogue scientists, who are mostly funded by the oil industry; the oil giant Exxon, and of course, George W. Bush; who is also funded by the oil industry.

George W. Bush is a man who has oil in his veins. The Bush family dynasty is built on oil. Prescott Bush, Bush’s grandfather was a director of Dresser Industries, the oil services company that would later merge with its main rival Halliburton. His father, George H.W. Bush, also worked for Dresser in the oil-services business and had his offshore oil-drilling business, Zapata Offshore. Before becoming President, George W. Bush ran a series of failed oil businesses. The family was closely connected to the energy giant Enron before it collapsed in 2001. They have extremely close connections to oil interests in Saudi Arabia .

Craig Unger, author of the best-selling book House of Saud: House of Bush has examined the close relationship between the Bush and Saud families. He asks why just two days after the September 11th attacks in 2001, 140 Saudi citizens, many whom were related to Bin Laden, were allowed to leave the US.  Unger documents how “the oil-rich House of Saudi struck out for America in the wake of the OPEC oil embargo and soaring oil prices” looking for access to American political power. They found the Bush family. “And with the Bushes, the Saudis hit a gusher- direct access to Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush, as well as to Secretary of State James Baker, Vice-President Dick Cheney, and the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus” .

When George W. Bush was elected President he asked Dick Cheney, one of his father’s old mentors, to be his Vice Present. Cheney had walked the corridors of world power for three decades. He is also the ex-President of Halliburton, the global construction company that is an inherent part of the oil industry . Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s Secretary of State, was a Director of Chevron for a decade from 1991 until 2001. During this time Chevron was accused of human rights abuses in Nigeria. Rice even had a Chevron tanker named after her. Bush’s Commerce secretary, and close friend, Don Evans was the CEO of Tom Brown Inc, a natural gas company.

Of the top 10 lifetime contributors to George W Bush’s war chests, six either come from the oil business or have ties to it, according the Center for Public Integrity.

It was Dick Cheney who President Bush asked to head up a committee on his energy strategy that reported in 2001. The report was heavily criticised domestically for being in favour of the oil and nuclear industries and for advocating opening up areas currently off-limits for oil drilling such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. “The Bush plan would despoil the environment, threaten public health and accelerate global warming”, retorted the environmental group, Natural Resources Defence Council”.  The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is considered America’s last wilderness that is home to the 150,000 Porcupine Caribou herd.

Opponents of Bush and the oil industry say that any oil development would be disastrous and that the record of the oil industry in Alaska is one of routine pollution, disregard of health and safety regulations, decades of broken promises, and cost cutting where-ever possible. Just this month, a citizens group in Alaska, called the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens' Advisory Council, that was set up after the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989, issued a report that showed that the oil industry was making  $625,000 an hour profit or $15 million a day in Alaska. This was at the same time as the oil industry was arguing it needed to reduce certain environmental protection measures, or is unable to add new protection, because of financial reasons.

Just as the oil industry and its friends in the White House try to water down environmental protection in Alaska, they have tried to water down the evidence of climate change and delay any need for action. Earlier this month it was finally confirmed what many had long suspected. The oil industry and Exxon in particular pressurised the White House not to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol, the United Nations agreement to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. It is the oil industry that has spent some $440 million over the past six years on politicians, political parties and lobbyists in order to protect its interests in Washington .

Documents obtained under US Freedom of Information legislation show that Paul Dobriansky, the Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs, thanked Exxon officials for their “active involvement” in helping to determine climate change policy. Another document notes how President Bush had “rejected Kyoto in part based on input from you”. The “you” being the Global Climate Coalition, the main fossil fuel lobby group that has fought action against climate change for over a decade. It is dominated by Exxon.

Also this month a former oil industry lobbyist, Philip Cooney, who became the Chief of Staff for the White House Council on Environmental Quality was forced to resign after it emerged that he had  “repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between greenhouse gases and global warming.” Cooney, who had no scientific training, was the former “climate team leader” and lobbyist at the American Petroleum Institute . Last week it emerged that Cooney has now been given a job by Exxon.

It has also emerged just how badly Bush and his oil company backers have managed to sabotage any action on climate at the G8 and undermine the British action. Yesterday The Observer revealed how leaked documents showed how Washington officials “Removed all reference to the fact that climate change is a 'serious threat to human health and to ecosystems'”; “Deleted any suggestion that global warming has already started” and “Expunged any suggestion that human activity was to blame for climate change”.

The British government has admitted that the signing by the US of the Kyoto Protocol at the Gleneagles Summit is “off the Agenda”. It will not be discussed. There is more chance of Bush sitting and having tea with Osama Bin Laden than signing the Protocol.

President Bush is an oilman who will not bite the hand that feeds him. He is doing all he can to wreck the planet. The President and his oil company backers will be allowed to carry on their gas-guzzling ways, whilst the rest of the world heads for a climate catastrophe.  No amount of photo-shoots and weasel words will hide the fact that Blair has failed to persuade his “friend Bush” to act positively on climate. He has also failed to stop him carrying on the oil industry’s twenty-year campaign to deny climate change even exists.

Blair and the other G8 leaders should stand up to Bush, not just the oilman, but Bush the bully. The bully who got his way over Iraq; got his way on inhuman torturing of inmates at Guantanamo Bay; got his way so often before and is getting away with murder due to his stance on climate change.  

The message from Britain to Bush should be “You are Banned” from the G8 Summit. We should ban Bush from coming until he signs up to the Kyoto Protocol and accepts that climate change is real.  We should force him to stay at home and suffer the indignity of being rejected by the world’s most powerful nations. He should feel excluded from the decision-making, just as millions are excluded by him and his policies. We don’t need Bush and neither does the planet.

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