On July 27,
the Bush administration unveiled a new pact between the
United States and several of the powerhouse nations of
the Asian economy, including South Korea, China, Japan,
India, and Australia. Representatives of the nations
party to the pact were to hold their first official
meeting in November, but that has now been pushed back
to sometime after the beginning of the new year. The
agreement, though, called the Asia-Pacific Partnership
on Clean Development and Climate, was, at the time of
its unveiling, a surprise move made to fight the
perceived threat of global warming. (For more
information on the science, see page 21.)
The new
pact is noteworthy for a number of reasons, not least of
which is that it is concrete proof that the Bush
administration, internationally castigated for its
reluctance to embrace the draconian Kyoto Accord, views
global warming as a threat. There is more to the story,
though, than just the Bush administration's embrace of
global warming orthodoxy. That was never really in doubt
anyway.
The real
story about the new pact has largely been ignored. To
listen to most reports in the mainstream media, the new
pact is a unilateral move by the United States to
undermine Kyoto. What is missed or ignored is that
the pact, negotiated over
a period of months in near complete secrecy, amounts to
an internationally constructed plan to send aid, in the
form of high technology, to foreign nations. In the case
of China, these foreign aid plans are particularly
dangerous.
The
Blair Factor
Constrained
since taking office by popular conservative disdain of
global warming alarmism, the Bush administration has had
to steer the nation away from the UN's Kyoto Accord.
That treaty mechanism, favored by leftists in Europe and
elsewhere, would have required reductions in emissions
of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases
to such a degree that the U.S. economy would have been
severely harmed. By one widely cited estimate, the cost
of implementing Kyoto would be a staggering $716
billion. Since abandoning Kyoto, the Bush administration
(which has been eager to find a global warming plan it
could call its own) has been under severe and continual
pressure to either reconsider or implement some other
related plan.
The
principal agent of this pressure campaign has been the
office of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Though the
House of Lords recently released a report critical of
the science behind the anthropogenic (human-caused)
global warming hypothesis, Blair has consistently
advocated policies supposedly formulated to fight the
perceived threat of climate change. Usually he has done
so in a way that points the finger at
America.
At the
World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January
26, for instance, Blair pointed to purported differences
in opinion between the UK and the U.S., and urged the
two countries to work together on the issue. "On both,
there are differences that need to be reconciled," he
said. "And if they could be reconciled or at least moved
forward, it would make a huge difference to the
prospects of international unity, as well as to people's
lives and our future survival."
Blair
turned up the pressure at the recent G8 Summit held in
Gleneagles, Scotland. Overshadowed by the terrorist
attacks on the London transit system that occurred
during the summit was Blair's continued call for the
United States to do something about global warming. This
time, he emphasized that he wasn't looking for the
United States to join Kyoto per se, but to do something
technological that would have an impact. "What I am
trying to do at the G8," Blair said during an appearance
on MTV, "is say: 'America is not going to sign the Kyoto
Treaty, let's leave that to one side.'"
Instead,
what Blair wanted to focus on was an effort to move
beyond Kyoto. Foreshadowing the announcement of the
U.S.-Asian pact on climate change that would be unveiled
just weeks later, Blair, exercising the presidency of
the G8, invited both China and India to the summit.
Noting during a summit press conference that it will be
"emerging economies, like China, like India, who, in the
future, are going to be the major consumers of energy,"
the British prime minister steered the summit toward a
joint "communiqué" that emphasized the need to invest in
clean technologies and to help developing countries. "We
will promote innovation ? and accelerate deployment of
cleaner technologies," said the heads of state in
The Gleneagles Communiqué. "We will work
with developing countries to enhance private investment
and transfer of technologies, taking into account their
own energy needs and priorities."
Implementing
the Post-Kyoto Plan
The press,
both in the United States and elsewhere, has been
working to paint the U.S.-Asian pact as the surprising
action of a renegade superpower. Soon after the pact was
announced, for instance, the London Times
reported: "The British Government appears to have been
caught unawares by the announcement of a six-country
pact spearheaded by the United States and Australia to
promote cleaner energy technologies across the
Asia-Pacific."
In fact,
the pact could not have been much of a surprise at all
to the Blair government. Indeed, in its major
provisions, it is essentially identical to the
Blair-engineered G8 Communiqué. During the press
conference when the pact was announced on July 28 in
Vientiane, Laos, Deputy Secretary of State Robert
Zoellick seemed like he was reading directly from the G8
script. The pact, Zoellick told the assembled press,
"focuses on the interests of energy, both energy
security, but also energy efficiency. It focuses on the
vital role of energy in development and it also focuses
on the issues of climate change. It opens up the
possibilities for developing, deploying, and
transferring cleaner, more efficient
technologies."
A "vision
statement" issued by the nations party to the pact also
echoed G8 sentiments. According to the joint statement,
the parties pledged to "work together, in accordance
with our respective national circumstances, to create a
new partnership to develop, deploy and transfer cleaner,
more efficient technologies and to meet national
pollution reduction, energy security and climate change
concerns, consistent with the principles of the U.N.
Framework Convention on Climate Change."
Communist
China
This
statement is important because it confirms that the Bush
administration supports the principles of Kyoto. But
greater ramifications may come from the pact's
explicitly stated goal of technology transfer,
especially to Communist China.
With regard
to China, the pact has two goals. First is the obvious
goal of helping the Chinese convert energy production
from older polluting technologies to the cleaner
technologies coming online in the West. The second and
more important goal is to give China (and India)
technologies that can generate power more efficiently in
the hopes of slaking that nation's growing thirst for
oil. At present, demand for fossil fuels in China is
growing rapidly and may be approaching a crisis point.
This, certainly, is the reality that drove the failed
attempt of the government-run Chinese National Offshore
Oil Company to purchase UNOCAL this summer. It was also
the motivation for China National Petroleum Corp.,
another government-run energy company, to make the
successful acquisition of the formerly Canadian-owned
PetroKazakhstan for $4.18 billion.
Realistically,
technology and other assistance transferred to the
Chinese via the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean
Development and Climate will likely have very little
impact on that nation's demand for energy. China is
already the second-largest consumer of oil after the
U.S., using some 5.5 million barrels daily. But it
hasn't been enough. According to the Washington
Post, in some areas China has "started rationing
electric power to industrial plants, and several cities
suffered brownouts during heat waves last
summer."
Though it
won't even make a dent in China's rapacious demand for
energy, technology transfer will have an impact, and one
that could harm U.S. interests. Chinese firms operating
in the current neo-fascist Chinese economic system
already flood the U.S. market with goods made cheap by
government subsidies. Transferring advanced energy
technologies to China will only serve to undermine the
current technological edge Western firms depend on to
remain competitive.
A more
sinister possibility, though, is that the envisioned
technology transfers will result in the further
strengthening of the dangerous People's Liberation Army
(PLA). It is well-known that the PLA already envisions
the United States as its chief military rival of the
future, that it has designs on the free people of
Taiwan, and that it is aggressively modernizing its
technology to allow force projection beyond Chinese
territory.
According
to authors Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett II,
the PLA receives much of its funding for these efforts
from the commercial enterprises it controls. In the book
Red Dragon Rising, Timperlake and Triplett note:
"By some accounts, the PLA's business empire comprises
20,000 companies, employing 600,000 people and having a
turnover of at least $20 billion per year." PLA
industries make more than guns. According to Timperlake
and Triplett, the Washington Post reported that
by 1998, the PLA "controlled 20 percent of China's
automotive industry and ran nearly 400 pharmaceutical
factories, 1,500 hotels, and four of China's 10 biggest
clothing factories." The PLA does all this under its
doctrine of "Military-Civilian Unity." Transferring
high-tech energy production equipment and expertise to
Communist China will only tend to increase the power of
the PLA.
Nevertheless, the
Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and
Climate will likely be the model for future
international efforts to combat the supposed dangers of
global warming. "The question is," said Prime Minister
Blair during the G8 summit, "can we, as we go forward,
create the conditions in which, when Kyoto ends -- which
it does in 2012 -- it's possible for the world to move
into consensus." The U.S.-Asia-Pacific pact is the first
manifestation of that new international consensus, one
that may lead to a more dangerous
world.
