The White House is increasingly viewed as the east coast branch office of ExxonMobil and Peabody Coal. Last year, the president reneged on his campaign promise to cap emissions from power plants. He then released his energy plan — basically a fast track to climate hell. He then withdrew the US from the Kyoto Protocol. Today the administration tells us we’ll just have to live with the impacts of an increasingly unstable climate.

The president withdrew from the protocol because he sees it as too costly and unfair because it exempts the developing countries from the first round of cuts. At some point he might learn it was his father who approved that exemption. And for good reason. We in the North created the problem. We in the North should take the lead and the rest of the world will come along. The truth is that if we in the North don’t get this right, we will suffer severe environmental and economic consequences whether or not we succeed in imposing energy restrictions on developing countries.

Because most of the EU recognises this fact, there are a growing number of commentators who believe that global political leadership will be passing away from the US over the climate issue. This loss of political leadership seems likely also because of the US withdrawal from a number of other significant international conventions, eg, agreements on landmines, biological weapons and an International Criminal Court.

Moreover, while President Bush has made national security his signature issue, he seems not to understand that national security depends, first and foremost, on natural security. Consider the need for a global and appropriate solution to the climate crisis — worldwide carbon emissions of 70 per cent or more. Creating a renewable energy economy would dramatically reduce US dependence on oil — and with it our exposure to the political volatility in the Middle East. A renewable energy economy — with its home-based fuel cells, stand-alone solar systems and regional wind farms — would make the nation’s electricity grid a far less strategic target for terrorists.

What is really required is a major change in the US posture towards developing countries. A properly-funded global transition to clean energy would create millions of jobs and raise living standards in the developing world. Diplomatically, it would be the kind of proactive policy needed to begin to address the economic desperation that underlies anti-US terrorism. Conversely, continuing indifference to climate change will most likely spawn more guerrilla attacks from people whose homelands are going under from rising seas and whose crops are destroyed by weather extremes.

US recalcitrance — and escalating climate change — is quickly making the Kyoto goals (but not the Kyoto process) obsolete. We will soon need to begin to go for the 70 per cent reductions nature requires to keep this planet hospitable. An effort of that magnitude would create millions of jobs, especially in developing countries. It would allow developing economies to grow without regard to atmospheric limits — and without the budgetary burden of imported oil. And in a very short time, the renewable energy industry would eclipse high technology as the central, driving engine of growth of the global economy. (For one specific proposal for such a plan, please see Toward A Real Kyoto Protocol at www.heatisonline.org.)

The climate threat holds an extraordinary promise. Ultimately, its solution has the potential for reversing some very destructive dynamics in today’s world. In urging us all to adapt to these changes, President Bush is condemning the world to environmental and economic disintegration.

His potential for real statesmanship lies not in his coalition against terrorism. It lies in mobilising the whole world around a common global project which would expand the overall wealth of the global economy as it expands the baseline conditions for peace — peace among people and peace between people and nature.