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Officially the summit, which wrapped up last week in Johannesburg, was to discuss and agree upon a plan for sustainable development, that much-discussed but little-understood buzzword of the moment. But at times the main U.N. talkfest, held in the upmarket suburb of Sandton, Africa's richest square mile, was lost in the gaggle of voices and slogans surrounding the conference. At the Ubuntu Village (ubuntu is Zulu for humanity), booths touting the environmental credentials of multinational oil companies stood beside those of tiny green groups. One promoted the teachings of Mohandas Gandhi as environmentally friendly. "Gandhi was green...
SOUTH AFRICA Baby Steps Toward Tomorrow The earth summit in Johannesburg ended on an unexpected upbeat note for the Green lobby. Russia and Canada announced they will seek to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Their decision means the treaty, including its system of trading rights to emit carbon, should now be able to take effect. Other achievements of the summit included an agreement on water and sanitation. Governments pledged to halve the number of people (about 1.1 billion) lacking clean water and basic sanitation by 2015. Delegates also agreed that international trade deals will no longer be able...
...Powell Silenced at Summit No wonder President Bush didn't want to go to the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. Secretary of State Colin Powell was continuously heckled during his speech to the closing session on Wednesday when he sought to defend the U.S. record on the environment and criticized Zimbabwe's seizure of white-owned farms...
...Johannesburg, for example, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Japan and other major producers and consumers of oil joined forces to squelch a European Union initiative to set a target and a timeline for increasing the proportion of their energy needs derived from renewable sources. It's not hard to see why the Saudis - who sit on top of almost two thirds of the planet's known oil reserves - might balk at governments being urged to use tax incentives and subsidies to woo their consumers off of fossil fuels. Elsewhere, however, it was the EU in the environmentalists' doghouse for nixing...
...epic problems on which governments can't agree, formalizing an emerging global 'civil society' to engage with common problems and search for working solutions. It is in the networking and the sharing of ideas in hundreds of smaller seminars and presentations that the real impact of the Johannesburg summit will occur. And the growing power of that global, non-governmental constituency of environmentally concerned groups should not be underestimated. Their influence on global public opinion, and even consumer behavior, may be the single most important reason why more than 700 of the world's leading corporations (among them major...