Global Policy Forum

By Michael Christie

Pacific and Australian environmentalists reacted with horror on Friday to US President George W. Bush's plan to boost coal, oil and nuclear power production, branding the proposal a "crime". Among the most vulnerable to climate change, a group representing Pacific islanders complained the region's concerns were being ignored, even though some of its tiny, low-lying nations faced obliteration if sea levels rose too far.

"If the worst comes to the worst, if it comes to the crunch in climate change, some communities and cultures here will cease to exist. It's totally unjust," said Patrina Dumaru, climate officer for the Fiji-based Pacific Concerns Resources Centre. "We are all environmental criminals. But there must be a new category for the United States. I would like to see an international justice system that would recognize this crime," said Dumaru, whose organization is a regional umbrella group for non governmental organizations.

The small Pacific island states face more intense cyclones, sea erosion and some may sink beneath the waves if temperatures continue to rise due to global warming, according to studies. "We do not generate all that much pollution but are always at the receiving end," said an official in Kiribati, a collection of 33 islands, with 65,000 people, astride the equator.

Bush, a former Texas oil man, on Thursday offered measures to drive up production in nuclear energy and fossil fuels in order to beat back high oil prices, blackouts and a "darker future". The proposals included $10 billion in tax incentives for hybrid vehicles that use a combination of solar power and petrol, and for homeowners to install solar panels.

"COMBINATION OF EXXON VALDEZ AND CHERNOBYL"

But global environmentalists accused the US president of delivering an "energy scam" rather than a plan, and said it could have been drafted in a boardroom of one of the US oil firms. Australian Greens leader Senator Bob Brown accused Bush of paying back the oil interests who supported his campaign. "He's come up with a combination of Exxon Valdez and Chernobyl," Brown told Reuters, adding Bush had missed a once-in-a-generation chance to give the so-called Sunrise Industries, developing new forms of energy, a fillip.

The Exxon Valdez tanker spilled 35,000 tones of crude over the Alaskan coast in 1989, and the world suffered its worst nuclear accident at Ukraine's Chernobyl plant 15 years ago. The emphasis on fossil fuels, blamed by a UN scientific body for causing most of the greenhouse gases that could sharply increase world temperatures, came on the heels of Bush dumping the 1997 Kyoto protocol on cutting carbon dioxide emissions.

Kyoto committed the main industrialized nations to cutting greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 5.2 percent from 1990 levels by 2012. Bush said the accord was economically harmful and impractical as it did not include developing nations, like China.

The tiny nation of Tuvalu, which consists of around 10,000 people on eight inhabited atolls, this week urged the US government to reconsider its rejection of Kyoto, according to the Pacific Islands Broadcasting Association News Services. "Tuvalu and other Pacific least developed countries may be viewed by the industrialized nations as strategically unimportant to them," Tuvalu finance minister Lagitupu Tuilimu told a UN conference in Brussels. "But the Kyoto protocol may be the only means to safeguard the survival of an entire living society," Tuilimu said.

NUCLEAR POWER A PACIFIC NO-NO

Climate officer Dumaru said she was also alarmed at Bush's plan to increase nuclear power output. The Pacific was a leading testing ground for US and French nuclear bomb tests from the 1960s to the mid-1990s, and opposition in the region to nuclear power is fierce.

"If nuclear power output grows, then they will be looking for nuclear waste dumps and I fear the place they will look will be the Pacific," she said. "We're tired of everything they dish out on us." The Australian government did not immediately react. But Australia, a major coal exporter, backed Bush's stance over Kyoto, and has argued that without US involvement, an alternative plan including developing nations to fight climate change should be negotiated.

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