The fiasco at Rio

...The entire event was not to Bush's benefit...

...Germany, filling the leadership vacuum, pressed for radically stronger limits on carbon dioxide emissions to restrain global warming...

...The internal battle over the treaty had been fought and decided months before the conference...

...During the summit's first week, McIntosh waited with a panther's patience for Reilly's recommendations...

...Early in 1990 he was unable to block a council proposal that will expose half of the nation's wetlands to developers...

...A week before the Earth Summit, without public comment and again at the prompting of the council, Bush took administrative action that allowed companies to increase the emission levels of some toxic discharges...

...But the work that is necessary to renew the environment, in both its natural and humanmade form, will generate jobs...

...Suddenly, the memo became public and captured the glare of some nine thousand media outlets...

...the delegates could not agree on a vehicle for carrying out the summit's recommendations...

...Overpopulation, the subject of a short and rancorous debate, was not addressed in any treaty or declaration...

...His memo, which suggested changes in diplomatic language that might reduce White House anxieties about technological transfers and the regulation of biotechnology, was once again eviscerated by McIntosh and his staff...

...role at the conference...

...Progressive academics, labor activists, women's groups, and whoever else might be in sympathy with social democracy have not often shared an affinity with the environmental movement...

...So revealed a Bush campaign strategist to the Wall Street Journal at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero last June...

...Some environmental groups considered the summit not a failure vitiated by compromise, but an achievement that finally linked ecological safeguards with appropriate economic development...

...he had lost every major internal battle for months, was forced to defend policies not to his liking, then became the object of ridicule when his plaintive memo received more attention than his diplomatic initiatives...

...He warned that the treaty would impair the ability of American corporations to protect their biological inventions and technologies overseas...

...By the end of this long conference, a dispirited Reilly murmured to the media that someone did not want a successful summit...

...The Declaration on Environment and Development, though nonbinding and broad in principle, does give priority for substantial foreign aid to developing nations, those "most environmentally vulnerable" participants...

...To top it off, Bush was overshadowed by the maximum environmentalist, Fidel Castro, who blamed the industrial world for a future ecological Armageddon...

...Reilly scrambled to find common ground with representatives of the 178 nations who were poised to sign the Treaty on Biodiversity with or without the United States...

...Environmental policy has reached a level of primary significance in the world community, equal in scope with the global economy and national security...

...The leaders of the world's poorest nations used Rio as a forum to call for a renewed attempt at redistributing wealth from North to South...

...The antipathy has been mutual...

...It would be hard to locate a policy debate in which Reilly has prevailed against Bush's corporatists...

...A kind of center-left effort to advance family planning as both a strategy for environmental protection and a way to achieve higher living standards was opposed by an odd coalition of Islamic fundamentalists, the Vatican, and some feminist groups that argued that government should not interfere with the reproductive rights of women...

...A national program that includes every urban center increases job opportunities by several orders of magnitude...

...The issue is frozen along these rigid lines by the media, the political forces involved, and those corporate and political leaders who benefit from this separation...

...The old Soviet bloc claimed that the road to a free market granted it special status in the world community, unchaining it from obligations to assist underdeveloped societies...

...Sustainable development, a catch phrase that appears in most accounts of the summit and its countless official documents, might bring together an international constituency of northern Greens and southern nationalists...

...Even Rio's most public success, the legally binding Global Warming Convention, which recommends the curbing of greenhouse gases, could not get U.S...

...Japan pledged a considerable expansion of its foreign aid budget to fund environmental programs in poor nations and seemed surprised that the United States offered so little...

...A senior American delegate told the New York Times that the leaked memo was a "little hand grenade" tossed by Reilly's bureaucratic opponents...

...All of this contributed to a feeling of cynicism about the U.S...

...A typical large municipality employs an army of engineers, inspectors, scientists, and laborers to cleanse its water supply and dispose of its sewage...

...Some groups judged the summit a failure for not building a mechanism to oversee the transfer of resources from rich countries to poor ones...

...Rio could prefigure a new post—cold war diplomacy that is fluid in its alignment and less confined by ideology...

...in each instance the power arc has leaned toward protecting the polluters, not the natural resource...

...The left has to fuse two impulses—full employment and environmental protection—to move an agenda...

...To many participants, Bush seemed paralyzed by the dominant impulses of his Republican party...

...Both the Wildlife Fund and Natural Resource Defense Council were cautiously supportive of the process in their public comments...

...Bush balked at signing the so-called biodiversity treaty, which would protect plant and animal life, claiming that the agreement would imperil American jobs and limit the domestic development of biotechnology, an industry already embattled by legal and political challenges from health, labor, and women's organizations...

...David McIntosh, the executive director of the President's Council on Competitiveness, chaired by the increasingly visible Dan Quayle, had ruined the Rio treaty and the EPA's chances for success by savaging the policy in an April memo...

...This was a hot button most delegates did not want to press...

...Certain key themes were hardly broached...

...A powerful statement, but without the teeth needed for enforcement and oversight...

...Although sparked by rhetorical 432 • DISSENT flourishes, the conference also retreated from a collision with arguably the root cause of the earth's environmental decay: the wasteful habits of the industrial world...

...Still, nobody was the target of more stringent criticism than the Bush administration...

...Although many unions have supported vigorous clean air and clean water laws, labor leaders must protect jobs, while environmentalists want to close factories that spoil the sea and sky...

...Quayle's council had routed Reilly's EPA, and not for the first time...

...Midway through the Rio conference, Reilly's position had become untenable...

...The former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe competed with the South for substantial aid from the industrial North...

...During the conference, third world and European nations alike criticized the isolated Bush administration's refusal to sign a treaty that would better conserve the world's diminishing animal and plant species...

...Corporate profitability still remains the glue that binds the Republican elite, however saddened some of the weary old guard might be by the acid-death of trees...

...support without dropping all target goals for reducing emissions...

...The geometry of FALL • 1992 • 431 political power has had a consistent configuration throughout the Bush presidency...

...Greenpeace draped a banner across Rio's Sugar Loaf Mountain that censured the conference for selling out the planet...

...Bush's team had succeeded in turning a complicated diplomatic negotiation into a melodrama that cast the White House in the role of eco-outlaws...

...The South interpreted this as the kind of avarice often seen before in the affluent, self-centered North...

...Bill Reilly, the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) chief administrator, was caught in an internal policy dispute that suggested the White House preferred the environmental policy of its conservative advisers and ultimately sabotaged his role as administration spokesperson...

...New regulations required by the 1990 Clean Air Act have been suppressed because of the council's recalcitrance...

...A commitment from the federal government going even partly along the soft path explored at Rio, which protects forests and wildlife while sustaining our air and water, would invent appropriate technology on a New Deal scale...

...Many environmentalists would seem to agree that Reilly's nameless tormentors accomplished their goal...

...He justified his own environmental policies, claiming "the leading record on forests and protecting the elephants...