Word: summited
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Producer Quincy Jones managed, in the 1980s, to get the world's leading rock stars to sing "We Are the World" in perfect harmony - by insisting that they "check their egos at the door." But harmony has proved elusive at the United Nations-sponsored World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg - because the participant governments don't check their interests at the door. As 100 heads of state gathered for Wednesday's closing session, negotiators were still struggling after almost two weeks of horse-trading over the terms and provisions of a summit declaration that in the end will...
...even going into the conference, there was widespread skepticism over whether the goals stated in such declarations (even if they did contain precise targets and timelines - which they don't - they're not enforceable, anyway) justify the environmental impact of the jet-fuel used to fly some 10,000 summiteers and about five times as many camp followers to South Africa for the event. Indeed, the Johannesburg summit was originally intended as a followup to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, whose lofty proclamations went the way of most lofty proclamations. The perennial failure of such summits to produce meaningful...
...putting all the politically charged questions of poverty and pollution on the agenda of a two-week talk-shop, the Summit inevitably did more to highlight global schisms than to resolve them. There was the traditional "North-South" divide between rich nations and poor nations; the Kyoto signatories (Europeans and the developing world) against the Kyoto skeptics (the Americans and a handful of oil-dependent and -producing nations); and the U.S. vs. the Rest of the World (a schism exacerbated by the Bush administration's unapologetic unilateralism on environmental and other global affairs, underscored by the President's absence from...
...Despite the discord, and the inevitable banality of the Summit's centerpiece document, plenty is still achieved in and around these gatherings. They remain a key forum for sharing experiences and practical solutions to some of the 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...
SOUTH AFRICA Development in Deadlock At least 20,000 people from 193 countries were in Johannesburg for the World Summit on Sustainable Development. The summit agreed to restore most of the world's major fisheries to commercial health by 2015 by reducing catches to a level that can be maintained indefinitely. Yet other progress was scant. The U.S. and the E.U. declined to discuss cutting their subsidies to agriculture. And they disagreed over targets for renewable energy, the cleanup of pollutants and the protection of endangered species. The Europeans want renewables to account for 15% of the world's total...