Bali hi: Holding US accountable

Things are getting rambunctious in Bali. After the American Nobel Peace Prize winner told the conference, "My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali.” the German representing the European Union threatened to boycott Bush's play-conference on global heating next month in Hawaii if that obstructionism ends in stalemate at this conference.

The U.S. is not the only obstruction: you can count Russia, China, Japan, India and Canada among the polluting nations that don't want to be held to account on emissions. But the U.S. is taking the brunt of the criticism. From the NY Times story: “The best we hoped for was that the U.S. would not hobble the rest of the world from moving forward,” said Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit American organization. “Our delegation here from the States has not been able to meet that low level of expectation.”

Gore's speech was covered more thoroughly in an outlet in India which described it as "a speech likely to go down in history as an oratorical milestone in the fight against global warming." (Hat tip to Meteor Blades at Daily Kos, who has been one of the few American journalists to report on this story every day of the Bali conference.) So through this story we learn that Gore did not offer his indictment of what the Bushites in power are doing to subvert the conference as an excuse for inaction.

Gore said: "My country is not the only one that can move forward. You can do one of two things. You can feel anger and frustration and direct it at the US. Or you can move forward and keep a large blank space in your mandate, saying our mandate is incomplete but we're moving forward in the hope that it will be filled in by the time we have a treaty in Copenhagen at the end of 2009."

"If you show anger, the entire world could lose momentum," he warned. The imperative is not for blame but for action. "We can't afford to talk for the next five years," he said, "when the scientists are telling us we have to take action within the next 10 years."

In truth, much of what the India story quotes from the speech is boilerplate Gore, recognizable from his Nobel address and even his testimony to Congress last year. But there was one stirring section I hadn't heard before: "Our capacity to strip away disguises is necessary now. We are one people on one planet, we've one future and one destiny. What we need now is capacity building in developed countries for political leadership."