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SEVENTY-FOUR, AUGUST 1, 2002
(Copyright © 2002 The Blacklisted Journalist)
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DUMB DUMBYA BLOCKS PLAN TO SAVE MILLIONS OF LIVES
From
- Sat Jun 15 13:26:46 2002
To: ps <portside@yahoogroups.com>
From: portsideMod <portsidemod@yahoo.com>
Date: Sun, 2 Jun 2002 20:09:58 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: Bush blocks bid to save millions of lives
Bush
Blocks Bid to Save Millions of Lives
By
Geoffrey Lean
June
2, 2002, The lndependent/UK
European
governments have long suspected it. Environmentalists have long proclaimed it.
But now there is clear evidence that President George Bush's environmental
policy is indeed a load of crap.
For
the United States is blocking an international plan to halve the number of
people, two-fifths of the population of the planet, who have no sanitation. Some
European
and developing nations, meeting in Bali, Indonesia, want the world's leaders to
agree to meet this target by 2015. They are proposing that the plan
The
summit - officially called the World Summit for Sustainable Development - is to
concentrate on the environmental problems faced by the world's poorest people.
The Bali meeting, which is the final preparatory conference for the summit, is
running into trouble, with the Bush administration, in the words of one top
Whitehall source, being "very, very negative".
More
than 2.2 million people - mainly children " die in the Third World every year
from diseases caused by lack of sanitation and by dirty drinking water. The
Margaret
Beckett, the Secretary of State for the Environment, who is leading Britain's
delegation to Bali, describes dealing with this issue as "absolutely key to
any prospect of tackling poverty".
The
US position is baffling the other countries at the conference because the Bush
administration has already agreed a target of halving the number of people
without clean drinking water by the same date " and this is seen as
inseparable from solving the problem of sanitation. The British officials held a
special meeting with the American delegation on Thursday, but did not receive
any clear reason for their objection to the plan.
The
clash over sanitation is only one of a range of issues holding up an agreement
on a plan of action to present to the summit. OPEC countries are opposing a plan
- originating from an initiative by Tony Blair - to halve the number of people,
currently two billion, without any modern sources of energy, mainly by tapping
into renewable sources. And the US, Canada, Japan and Australia are objecting to
European proposals to make energy consumption in developed countries more
environmentally friendly.
Senior
British ministers fear that if the Bali conference fails to reach agreement it
will be hard for the Johannesburg summit to succeed - and the best chance of
tackling world poverty in two decades will be lost for the indefinite future.
" 2002 lndependent Digital (UK) Ltd ##
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