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TODAY Friday 5 December 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Feisty Euros at Kyoto

The newspaper with the largest circulation in the largest city in the United States this morning had no mention of the Kyoto climate conference -- the newspaper with the second-largest circulation, The New York Times, doesn't reach this precinct until later in the day -- and so today I have an untypical, Web-based view of the proceedings. From that vantage, at least, one observes some repeating patterns of national jockeying.

One immediately notes that, at least on the enviro websites (check out the links available through our Kyoto Junction), Europeans are attributed to have a stronger influence on the course of events than usually ascribed to them in the American press. Is this because the position of the European Union is the greenest of the major proposals? To be sure; even normally provincial American enviros talk about "not letting Europe down." Is it because so many European activists are in the corridors outside the conference rooms and at the keyboards on the journalism tables? Yes; you can tell by the odd spelling of "programme." And is it because the US -- with its carbon-burning consumers, its bigtime propaganda campaign from the fossil fuel industries, and its disappointingly underwhelming government proposal -- makes such a wonderfully appropriate target? Yes, yes, yes. There are enough US enviros swarming around Kyoto to stop the European greens from writing us off completely as a nation of earth-destroyers, but every now and then a note of national hostility creeps in, as when the ECO editors made fun of the way most Americans say "awrrange" when referring to the citrus.

The developing countries offer wary support to the Euro view. They too are a little tired of American exceptionalism, and they resent the American insistence (for domestic political purposes) that the developing countries undertake some kind of binding obligation from the outset. On the other hand, they worry that the Europeans, while letting them off the hook in the short-run, will over the long haul induce more energy dieting than the carbon-indulgent Americans. A Chinese bureaucrat and an Oklahoma senator have kindred views on the links between hydrocarbons and prosperity.

It still seems to me that either there will be no deal at all or that there will be a deal that closely approximates the US and Japanese proposals. Perhaps Canada will present the final package. I cannot for the life of me see how the EU position could ever be incorporated except as a special protocol that could apply only to EU members. The US Senate will vote down anything close to it, and the US delegation can't come home with a sure loser. But we'll see. The real fun starts this weekend.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

Our ace correspondent Bill McKibben arrives in Japan today, just soon enough to cover the Kyoto conference at crunch time. He promises to try to send more or less daily dispatches, but we're a little worried at this end. McKibben isn't exactly a technophobe, but he relies on his five-year old daughter to get his e-mail and he works on a thirty-pound laptop handwired by Steven Jobs in the late 1980s. We fear that transmitting documents through the ether over a Japanese hotel phone may prove a challenge. If you're reading this from anywhere near the Kyoto conference hall, please grab Bill and take him in hand.

 

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