Did you see ‘Wag the dog’ (1997) with Robert de Niro as a spin doctor and Dustin Hoffman as producer of fake war footage? It seems that ever since President Bush’s occupation of the White House, spin doctors are fully occupied with distorting truths and creating smokescreens. They must be having the time of their lives.

This time, they have put a spin on climate policies and out came a sentence that is full of capitals: “Under The President’s Proposal, The United States Will Convene The Major Emitters And Energy Consumers To Advance And Complete The New Framework By The End Of 2008”.

In other words: the US is claiming to take the lead a follow-up of the Kyoto Protocol that it didn’t even sign up to! That’s nerve, bordering to arrogance.

But look beyond the pompous façade and you’ll discover that the “New International Climate Change Framework” (why all these capitals?) is all about evasion of climate based emission targets (“You can’t manage the temperature. You can manage … emissions,” said Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality Jim Connaughton at the press conference). Furthermore the Framework aims to create a delay by proposing to arrive at national strategies in “the next 10 to 20 years”. In other words: nothing much will have changed by 2020.

The President doesn’t believe in mandatory targets, he believes in technology like “clean coal” and “clean safe nuclear power”. Here, the spin doctors did have to rely heavily on the power of adjectives to sell existing technologies as ‘sustainable’ innovations.

Let’s hope the European and other leaders will not get lured into this climate trap and that they will stick to their climate targets instead. It’s probably better to have a sound climate deal without the US, than to follow the proposed US-led Framework. Various experts expect the US to make a change of direction in climate policy anyway after the next Presidential Elections in 2008.

Jos Wassink,

Editor GreenPrices