Is America The Villian In Bali

For Al Gore, it was time to utter a new inconvenient truth that diplomatic niceties precluded others from telling: "My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here," he told a packed audience at the U.N. climate change summit in Bali. "We all know that."

"Over the next two years, the United States is going to be somewhere it is not right now," said Gore. "We are going to change in the U.S."

"You have to look to where we're going to be," Gore urged the Bali delegates. The problem with that advice for the Bali delegates, however, is that Gore is not the President.

Washington's official delegation has emerged as the chief spoiler in moves to take meaningful action on climate change. But among the most vocal critics of the official delegation has been an array of American environmentalists, legislators and state and local government officials. Carl Pope, president of the Sierra Club, called the U.S. performance "the most explicitly irresponsible action that any American Administration has taken in any of our lifetimes."

"I wanted to make certain that those folks who are involved in the negotiations understand that they are not alone in dealing with this," says (Senator John) Kerry. "The Administration is isolated in its own country." Kerry, Maine Republican Senator Olympia Snowe and 50 other members of Congress sent a protest letter Wednesday to President Bush calling for U.S. negotiators to drop their opposition to emission targets.

"People here are acutely aware of what's happening in the U.S. beyond the Bush Administration, and they take great heart in the growing momentum," says Eliot Diringer, director of international strategies for the Pew Center on Climate Change.

(excerpt from Time Magazine Dec 14, 2007 By BRYAN WALSH/NUSA DUA)
[I added photo of shrub and Saudi puppeteer making out from Flickr ("The best kleptocracy oil money can buy.")]