Where's al gore?
Carlson, Tucker
Where's Al Gore? by Tucker Carlson New York You probably don't hear a lot about global warming these days. But then, you probably don't live in the Republic of Maldives. Mau-moon Abdul Gayoom...
...If the planet continues to heat up at current rates, said Gayoom in a speech delivered in the U.N.'s General Assembly hall, the Maldives will become a modern Atlantis, "totally submerged" by the run-off from melting polar ice caps...
...The air-pollution standards outraged a number of important Democratic interests, including unions and a number of big-city mayors, and Gore can't afford to seem too green...
...The president of the Cuban national assembly, Ricardo Alarcon, attacked "international cooperation" as "an empty phrase," a statement about as close to blasphemy as anyone at the summit dared get...
...Saifuddin Soz, the Indian minister of environment and forests, also called for more cash, while denouncing "efforts to prescribe equal obligations and liabilities on unequal players"—in other words, efforts to force India to pay its share of the bill...
...Mau-moon Abdul Gayoom does—he's the president of the Maldives, in fact—and last week at the second United Nations Earth Summit in New York, he explained what global warming means to him and to his island nation...
...It is a view that is certain to be articulated by former Gore allies more often in months to come...
...Of the studies that support the rising temperature thesis, at least one credibly suggests that global warming will cause ocean levels to drop, through increased evaporation and snowfall over the poles...
...But no matter...
...During the recent debate over tighter air-quality standards, Gore offered not a single public word of encouragement to his former protegee, EPA administrator Carol Browner...
...Kitts and Nevis, requested immediate "contributions" from the "developed world...
...Five years after global warming became an international cause at the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, there is still no scientific consensus that the phenomenon even exists...
...publications with titles like "Gender Equality and Water Resources Management: Five Years After Rio," a reporter found Alarcon's old-fashioned Communist diatribe surprisingly fresh, even revolutionary...
...At the end of the day, it was Tony Blair, not Gore, who came away sounding the most like the Gore of old...
...Meanwhile, countries like the United States and . . . well, mostly the United States, get to foot the bill...
...Participation in the Convention makes it possible for a poor nation to receive U.N...
...Gore, who through his book Earth in the Balance and his role as head of the Senate delegation to Rio in 1992 did more than perhaps any other person to hype global warming, was almost invisible at the summit...
...How can it be done...
...It won't be easy...
...The Maldives will need more "resource mobilization," additional "technology transfer," dramatically increased "capacity building for the promotion of sustainable development," not to mention a strong dose of "global cooperation...
...parlance as a "developing nation"—and throughout the summit, delegates from the Third World took to the podium to follow the Maldives Model...
...they gave Alarcon a noticeably enthusiastic round of applause...
...Only Cuba, one of the few countries with no hope of getting American aid, strayed from the drill...
...Tucker Carlson is a staff writer for The Weekly Standard...
...I speak to you not just as the new British prime minister, but as a father," Blair said, looking misty...
...Gore's sudden change of heart hasn't gone unnoticed by environmentalists...
...By the time the U.N...
...In a recent New York Times article, the heads of both the League of Conservation Voters and the Environmental Information Center implied that Gore has betrayed the cause for political reasons...
...Gore is "cynically manipulating the environmental movement," says Pranay Gupte, editor of the Earth Times, which published a daily edition at the summit...
...Indeed, on at least two occasions, Gore's staff leaked word to reporters that the vice president's office was "furious" with Browner for not consulting with Gore before proposing such rigorous new standards...
...Not Maumoon Abdul Gayoom...
...Alarcon went on to blast the United States as single-handedly "responsible for the destruction of the environment," a country motivated by "insane selfishness" and "capitalist greed" that "accumulated its wealth by exploiting the Third World...
...The Maldives might be safe after all...
...Countries like Kiribati, Nauru, Vanuatu, Tuvalu, and Palau, none of them a major player on the world stage, are nonetheless signatories to the U.N...
...There is a solution to the looming crisis of global warming, Gayoom told the assembled delegates, a way not only to stem the rising tide of the earth's oceans and save the Maldives, but an opportunity to create in the process "a shared, a just, a prospering people's world...
...holds its next environmental conference, Gayoom warned, his country may be but a soggy memory...
...Gore's anger stretches credulity—he would have been aware of any new air-quality proposals long before they became pub-lic—but he clearly thinks he needs to distance himself from Browner...
...It's not a bad deal if you're a backward, poverty-stricken country with an egregious pollution record— known in U.N...
...The Earth Summit held few surprises, but one of them was Al Gore...
...His low profile has extended to other environmental questions as well...
...Convention on Climate Change...
...He's been seen to be the great ozone man, though I think people are now beginning to realize that with Gore there is less than meets the eye...
...money to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, while requiring it to do or pay virtually nothing in return...
...After delivering a short, tepid speech on the first day of the conference, Gore went back to Washington and stayed quiet...
...Later in his speech, Blair, in classic Gore fashion, observed that although "it takes less than an hour to fell a tree, it can take a lifetime to replace it...
...Robert Mugabe, the president of Zimbabwe, demanded "international cooperation" with his country, "particularly in the areas of trade, debt relief, provision of financial resources and technology transfer...
...Gayoom's speech came at an odd time in the history of the global-warming debate...
...His Excellency Sir Cuthbert Sebastian, the head of state of St...
...Global warming, real or not, is a potential cash cow for many Third World nations...
...It went on like this, speaker after speaker, day after day, for a week, an unending shakedown conducted entirely in diplomatic euphemisms...
...After hours of listening to speakers wax rhapsodic about the "framework of common but differentiated responsibilities," of leafing through U.N...
...Indeed, new data seem to show that parts of the planet (there is no "global" climate) are actually cooling off...
...Faced with such a grim prognosis, an ordinary world leader might have been tempted simply to give up, accept the inevitable, and buy a glass-bottomed boat...
...Gore wasn't just missing in action at the Earth Summit...
...In other words, said President Gayoom, the Republic of Maldives is going to need a whole lot more foreign-aid money from the United States...
...His fellow diplomats apparently did, too...
Vol. 2 • July 1997 • No. 42
