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 News from Around the Americas | July 2005 
Bush Arrives at Summit Session, Ready to Stand Alone
 Richard W. Stevenson & Alan Cowell - NYTimes
| | Police officers clashed with protesters on Wednesday near the site of the Group of 8 summit meeting in Scotland. (Photo: Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters) |
Glasgow, Scotland - President Bush arrived in Scotland on Wednesday for a summit meeting of the big industrial nations after signaling that he would not budge on one of the most contentious issues dividing the United States from its allies - how best to address global warming.
Mr. Bush reached the site of the meeting, the golf resort of Gleneagles, under heavy security and amid skirmishes between the police and protesters, who say the leaders of the eight nations gathered there have done too little to meet their pledge of making real progress in attacking poverty and disease in Africa.
Mr. Bush's approach to the environment is one of several topics on which he is at odds with other governments as well as public opinion in much of the world.
Before flying to Scotland from Denmark, he vigorously defended his foreign policy at a news conference with Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Mr. Bush said that there was "total transparency" at the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba and that the International Red Cross was free to inspect the center at any time. To those Europeans skeptical of his claims, Mr. Bush said he would "suggest buying an airplane ticket" and going to "take a look for yourself."
Mr. Bush said the war in Iraq had been justified despite its unpopularity in many nations, saying the conflict was "laying the foundation for peace." And he sought to counter criticism that the United States has been stingy in providing aid to Africa, saying his administration had taken a leading role in fighting AIDS and malaria there, and had promised to double aid from current levels by 2010.
He was especially pointed in asserting his view that the other big democracies were going down the wrong path in insisting that curbing global warming requires a commitment to numerical goals for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.
Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, the host of the meeting of the Group of 8 leaders, has been laboring to find some compromise on the issue for the United States to join the other industrial nations in a commitment to taking action against global warming.
At the news conference, Mr. Bush acknowledged there was a problem, saying, "I recognize that the surface of the earth is warmer and that an increase in greenhouse gases caused by humans is contributing to the problem."
But he made clear that he wanted to depart from the thinking behind the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement that sets targets for lowering emission and that Mr. Bush rejected early in his first term. The agreement has been ratified by the other Group of 8 nations, and the leaders of China and India are scheduled to join the talks about global warming on Thursday.
"The reason it didn't work for the world is many developing nations weren't included in Kyoto," Mr. Bush said. "I've also told our friends in Europe that Kyoto would have wrecked our economy. I don't see how you can be president of the United States and agree to an agreement that would have put a lot of people out of work."
Mr. Bush said it was time to move on to a "post-Kyoto era," in which all nations concentrate on developing technologies that reduce emissions rather than on imposing quotas on emissions.
Mr. Blair later signaled that there was little hope of achieving his goal of agreement on concrete commitments to reduce emissions, but said the summit meeting would nonetheless succeed in focusing attention on the problem.
"What I hope at this summit is that we can set a different direction of travel that gives us a possibility, when Kyoto expires in 2012, of getting an international consensus," he said in an interview with Sky News of Britain.
Along with the debate over climate change, aid to Africa will be the big issue taken up at the meeting, where Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush have been joined by the leaders of the other Group of 8 countries, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada and Russia.
After arriving at Gleneagles, Mr. Bush met with Bono, the lead singer of the Irish rock band U2, who has led a worldwide public relations campaign to cancel debts owed by African governments and provide more direct aid to the world's poorest nations. Earlier, in Denmark, Prime Minister Rasmussen gently chided the United States and the other big industrial democracies for not doing more, saying Denmark was far more generous.
"In fact, if all G-8 countries matched our effort, Africa would get $90 billion a year, instead of only $25 billion," he said, glancing at Mr. Bush.
In Scotland, police officers in riot gear fought a day of skirmishes with protesters who blocked roads leading to Gleneagles.
The clashes began early in the day as hooded demonstrators in Edinburgh walked across roads ahead of buses carrying journalists and others on the 40-mile drive to the resort. Some protesters chained themselves together across the M9 highway, forcing its closing for four hours.
The most serious clashes, still far from the violence of some earlier Group of 8 meetings, came in midafternoon, when hundreds of demonstrators broke away from a peaceful march and tried to breach a steel security fence thrown up around the Gleneagles estate.
The police flew in reinforcements by helicopter and, with batons, charged after protesters who fled across a field. Mounted police officers also confronted protesters, some of whom carried banners saying "Fight Poverty, Not War, Bring the Troops Home" and chanted slogans like "They say drop bombs, we say drop the debt."
Richard W. Stevenson reported from Glasgow for this article, and Alan Cowell from Gleneagles. |
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