john_passacantando

Some days, everything goes well. So it was last Thursday, September 27 for the opening session of President Bush’s “Big Emitters” meeting. The President has effectively undermined the global effort to stop climate change (the Kyoto Protocol) but now that the public is clamoring for solutions he attempted a fake effort. Like a fraternity prank at a global diplomatic level. Bush gathered representatives from the world biggest greenhouse gas emitters, including representatives from European countries, Japan, Australia and fast growing developing nations like China and India. Bush was attempting to have two days of happy talk at the State Department in Washington, DC about voluntary measures and technological fixes. Basically, a stall.

Instead he was upbraided inside by various delegates, professionally polite people who were unusually harsh towards Bush in their comments in the press and by activists at the front gate who were making sure that Americans knew this meeting was a fraud and that leaders from other governments knew that we out front knew it was a fraud. I was there with a large group of colleagues, volunteers, interns, students, one board member (Jeffrey Hollander, CEO of Seventh Generation) and allies from the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, Oil Change International and the US Climate Energy Council to make the point.

We spent a day in jail but the point was made. And not just by those of us in the handcuffs. From those silken-tongued delegates to the DC Police, there was kinship all around. Bush is completely isolated. History will judge which was his larger calamity, war against Iraq or stalling on global warming. Either way he’s left us all with a world in need of repair.