Russians Sink Kyoto Deal -- Where's the Protesting?
There was no noise from the green corner last week as the Russians decided that the Kyoto environmental treaty was not in their national interests. "The Kyoto Protocol places significant limitations on the economic growth of Russia," was the way Andrei Illarionov, one of President Putin's best and brightest, worded it. It was followed by intense silence from the global union of militant tree-huggers. Quite the double standard -- and it illustrates why so many Americans get annoyed with critics of the US.
If any nation in the world needs to clean up, it is Russia. This stems directly from the abysmal record of the Soviet Union in matters environmental -- from the Chernobyl meltdown to the vanishing of the Aral Sea. But the USSR has been dead and gone for over a decade, and the excuse that the Soviets did it is now running a bit thin.
By the same token, the Soviets also ran a pretty lousy economy, as anyone who ever stood in a queue for anything there can attest. Russians have a long way to go in their economic development before they can be said to enjoy excessive affluence. So, bearing in mind that people will vote for jobs and prosperity more often than a pretty sunset and untouched wilderness (of which Russia has rather a lot anyway), the Putin team opted for economic growth.
Yet, it doesn't really matter who pollutes the air and water quite so much as that someone does. But the response from the people who claim to care was disappointing in its inconsistency. Greenpeace put it down to pre-election bluster, Friends of the Earth had nothing for the media on this, and a search of the Sierra Club's website had news on Russia and Kyoto from 2002 and before. President Putin was not burned in effigy, there were no protests at any Russian embassy, and the best Forest.org could do was an e-mail campaign to get President Putin to change his mind.
It is a fact that Mr. Putin has decided to skip Kyoto, just as Mr. Bush did. It is also a fact that the environmental lobby failed to work itself up into the kind of tizzy over Moscow's decision that welcomed Washington's choice. One wonders why the greens feel it necessary to treat the Russians with kid gloves while hammering the Americans. Whether it is anti-Americanism or the quiet racism of low expectations they have of the Russians is a matter of debate, but the difference is there, and it is losing them supporters.
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