Greenpeace says world leaders lack credibility on protecting environment

WORLD leaders attending the special UN session called to take stock of progress since the 1992 Earth Summit have been accused of giving in to commercial interests and putting their own national interests above the welfare of future generations.

Dr Thilo Bode, executive director of Greenpeace International, told the major industrialised countries that their words about protecting the environment "lack credibility" because they had failed to provide real leadership on such issues as climate change.

Dressed in a sober suit for the first-ever speech by a Greenpeace representative to the UN General Assembly, Dr Bode told delegates that he stood before them "with some sadness" because so little had been achieved since the Rio summit five years ago.

"Glaciers are melting. Forests, are retreating. We are changing the seasons. We are running out of fish in the sea. We are poisoning our children with persistent organic pollutants and are accumulating nuclear waste to the peril of future generations.

"Outside this building there is another reality. Carbon-dioxide emissions have increased to unprecedented levels. Sea levels will rise so much that entire nations represented in this room may vanish", Dr Bode said.

At a press conference before his address, he said the "only agreement that exists here" was that the situation had worsened and he was "very pessimistic" about the prospects on climate change and forest destruction, the two major issues targeted by Greenpeace.

In both areas "big commercial interests" were working to frustrate solutions, Dr Bode said, adding that 25 Greenpeace activists had just been arrested in the Canadian province of British Columbia for protesting against continued logging in its forests.

He singled out the US as "the real problem" because it consumed "twice as much energy per capita as the rest of the industrialised world".

Dr Bode, who is German, also criticised his own country for subsidising fossil-fuel industries" with "billions of dollars" while it "tries to pretend it is an environmental leader" and proposes the establishment of a new world environmental body.

He said subsidies, particularly those going to "destructive sectors" such as agriculture, energy and transport ran counter to free market principles and the globalisation of world trade. Removing them would have a "very positive impact".

Referring to Monday's address by the British Prime Minister, Mr Blair, which was generally welcomed here for its strong commitment on climate change Dr Bode said that at the same time Britain was "supporting the search for new oilfields in the Atlantic".

In his own address to the delegates, he warned that the fate of the planet would be "determined by the bravery or cowardice of your response to the challenge of global climate change" at the crucial conference on this issue in Kyoto next December.

This would mark a threshold equivalent to earlier "defining points in human history", such as the abolition of slavery or the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, when the world "took deliberate steps toward true humanity".

But the suspicion being voiced here by, among others, Mr John Gummer, the former British environment secretary, is that the US plans to wait until the last minute to produce minimal proposals for the Kyoto meeting and force the others to go along with them.

The press conference also heard from Ms Joji Carino, of the Alliance of the Indigenous Tribal Peoples, who said if the world thought it worthwhile to have a convention to protect the diversity of plants and animals, surely the people of the rain forests should also be protected.