Dreams in Bali

[Hello again. Here's a post I wrote for another Times blog, 'Across the Pond', about US poltiics and the presidential elections.]

On the face of it, Asia is an unlikely place from which to pontificate on the US presidential election, and I am an unlikely pontificator. Drastic barriers of culture and language, the world’s largest ocean, and hours of time difference and separate Tokyo, Beijing and Bangkok from Washington, New York and LA. Compared to Europe, the US, for better or worse, has few historical, colonial associations with Asia. Personally, I have set foot in America three times in my life, and never for more than a few days.

But the lives of people in Asia have been profoundly affected by political decisions made in the United States. To a greater extent than Europeans, American actions over the past sixty years have been a marked blight, as well as a blessing. Twice in living memory, in Vietnam and in Korea, American troops have fought disastrous wars on Asian soil. Large concentrations of US troops remain in South Korea and Japan, arousing mixed feelings, at best. Of course, the brightest Asian students still compete to win places at US universities, American ideals of self-betterment and democracy inspire Asian politicians, and people of all backgrounds are avid consumers of American popular culture. In Europe, sentiments towards the US tend to veer between extremes of admiration and contempt; in Asia, the polarisation is less extreme, but there is an general and often unstated ambivalence about the vastness of American US power, and a scepticism about how much the American public and American their politicians understand or even care about the world’s largest continent.

The interaction between US politicians and Asia has been one of the most interesting things about a frequently boring and frustrating event – the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, where I write this. Here representatives of the negative American stereotype – arrogant, indifferent and patronising – have intersected with other Americans making an effort to putting over a very different image of responsiveness and responsibility.

I touched on some of this in my piece in this morning’s newspaper. To oversimplify: 190 governments have gathered in Bali to plan the next stage in the struggle against global warming. The European Union favours the kind of approach to the reduction of greenhouse gases on which the European Union has been created – rules and targets and commitments, agreed in detail, and legally binding on everyone. The US, at least the Bush administration, prefers a situation in which countries come up with their own targets, if any – if there are to be binding goals, it certainly doesn’t want any of them agreed this week.

The final document is being negotiated as I write. I’m not going into the rights and wrongs of the two arguments (although the alert among you may be able to work out where my sympathies lie). The Bali International Convention Centre is full of environmentalists heaping contumely on the US; it is important to filter most of this out. But, honestly, in its press conferences at least, the US delegation has failed to impress.

It is led by Paula Dobriansky, Under Secretary for Democracy and Global Affairs at the State Department. The expansive vagueness of this job description leads me to suspect that she is valued for her PR and presentational skills – and Ms D does have a certain auntyish charm. Attending one of her press conference is like standing as a five year old in front of your primary schoolteacher as she tells you it doesn’t matter that you have wet your knickers, but that you should try to make sure that it never happens again.

The real star is a bloke called James Connaughton, who opens new universes of meaning in the world oily.

Chip pans are oily. Mr Connaughton is not so much a chip pan as a pristine maritime national park into which a fully laden supertanker has disgorged its contents. He is also . . . well, listen to this quotation from yesterday’s conference which one indignant NGOs has put on flyers distributed on flyers scattered around the conference centre: “The US will lead and we will continue to lead,” he opined, in what come to be known as the Connaughton Doctrine. “But leadership also requires others to fall in line and follow.”

Fall in line at the back there! The last time I covered a big environmental shindig like this, the original Kyoto conference in 1997, there was another very prominent group: smooth, and extremely well paid lobbyists, funded by the oil and car industries and intent on debunking the very existence of climate change. If they are present in Kyoto, they are all but invisible. Instead one comes across a stellar team of top American politicians, supported by a corps of representatives of US states and cities. Many of them lament the Bush position, but they have none of the spittle-frothed contempt of the European NGOs.

Several of them, in fact, are Republicans. Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, was on the podium this afternoon, talking about his city’s carbon emission targets with the deputy mayor of London, Nicky Gavron. Lots of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s people were over, promoting California’s impressive green legislation. John Kerry dropped in and out, and my favourite was another Democrat, Congressman Edward Markey, who saved 5.36 tonnes of carbon emissions by delivering his speech virtually, as an avatar on Second Life. “I have teleported here over the Internet,” he announced, with admirable unselfconsciousness. (See his speech here).

But looking above all of them, of course, like a gorgeous golden pomegranate on a table of blackcurrants, is Al Gore. Everyone in Bali wanted a piece of Al last night, and when a rude UN policeman denied me entry to the auditorium because it already held 1000 people, I cried. (Just as well Paula Dobriansky came by, patted me on the head, and told me to be a good boy and watch it on the closed circuit TV like the other children).

Al, as many people have noted, has the gift of making climate change seem both a disaster and a privilege – he referred to America’s “greatest generation” and spoke of the pride with which we will all be able to tell our grandchildren about how we conquered global warming (if we do). But he has another gift – of soothing and smoothing away the scarcely veiled hostility towards the US administration palpably present in the conference centere.

Wisely, he didn’t labour it. “One year and 40 days from today, there will be a new inauguration in the United States,” he said, without gloating or smugness (it was the audience who supplied that.) “Over the next two years, the United States is going to be somewhere it isn't right now. You must anticipate that.” How remarkable and unexpected that having been so famously defeated by him at the polls, Al Gore should survive to make George Bush seem like a bad, fading dream.

Comments

[Tim Footman]

"...the US, for better or worse, has few historical, colonial associations with Asia"

Really depends on how you define colonialism, doesn't it? For memsahibs, read Starbucks.

Good to have you back, btw.

[FOARP]

It also depends on whether you view the stewardship of the Phillipines, the takeover of Hawaii, the years of intervention in China and various other American doings as colonialism, but this is arguing semantics.

The demonisation of the U.S. President, on the other hand, seems a little absurd, there is no real and absolute guarantee that the next U.S. President will be substantially different to the current one, nor is the U.S. now the largest CO2 producer in the world - China passed them this year.

It seems that in the area of environmental policy, it is people in the west who have more to fear from Asia countries and not vice-versa. A simple example demonstrates the point - an average of 25% of the pollution that forms over Los Angeles on any given day will have been blown in from across the Pacific, the majority of that coming from China. Worth pondering also is that China has a nominal GDP of about 1/6th of the United States but produces a greater amount of CO2. If CO2 production rises in proportion to nominal GDP then by the time that China has a per capita nominal GDP equal to that of the United States it will be producing more CO2 than is produced by the whole world right now.

[Hannan]

Enjoyed this, esp. your comparison of the composition of US delegations Kyoto to Bali. Still, the politics remains as trenchant as ever. At a meeting in Bonn in June, 130 countries signaled their preference for the UN to manage a new global climate adaptation. Not because of competence but for legitimacy. In Japan last week, the G8 turned this facility over to the World Bank. So your nuancing of US and EU positions means little when viewed from outside by the other 98 per cent. It's only a matter of time before developing countries that can will find their own mechanisms of solidarity with the rest of the Global South, while the old crusties from Europe and the New World fudge and obfuscate (viz. the Banco del Sur in Latin America as an alternative to the IMF/Bank axis). Cheerio!