I'm terribly embarrassed.
quote:Pro-Bush Americans Take to Street Against Kyoto
Reuters
Jul 18 2001 9:24AM
BONN, Germany (Reuters) - As anarchists in Genoa prepared to storm the G8 summit this weekend, a new breed of protester was on the streets of Bonn on Wednesday -- clean-cut conservatives opposing the climate treaty being discussed there.
While their leftist counterparts in Italy planned protests against globalization and U.S. defense and environment policies, a small group of U.S. Republican students traveled to Germany to defend their government's stance on global warming.
Around 20 protesters marched outside the security gates of the United Nations negotiations which will decide the future of the 1997 Kyoto climate pact, to back President Bush's decision to dump the deal.
"This was an opportunity to come and support our country, support our president and oppose a terrible treaty," said Craig Rucker, Executive Director of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow which organized the protest.
Rucker, who said he spearheaded a campaign last year against the environmentalist U.S. presidential candidate Ralph Nader, told Reuters around 40 like-minded students from around the United States had paid their own way to travel to Germany to press the rest of the world to scrap Kyoto.
"Our purpose in this project is to prove that the average college student isn't a Nader-voting, tree-hugging radical leftist," declared the group's Web site which the students had set as the homepage on computers available to delegates.
Interested parties have been allowed accreditation for the conference.
"AMERICANS BACK BUSH"
Alex Kaufman, a political science student at Cedarville University in Ohio, a Christian institution, said the majority opinion in the United States backed Bush's rejection of the Kyoto deal on slowing global warming.
"The fact that he was elected and ran on this issue proves that the majority of Americans are on our side," Kaufman said, rejecting polls that have suggested growing public support for international action to cut greenhouse gases.
Kaufman agreed with Bush's opponents who said the president was defending the interests of oil firms that had helped fund his election campaign. "That may be true to a small extent," he said, but added that Kyoto was in any case a danger to the world economy that had to be stopped.
The students, one dressed as a cow to ridicule the idea that methane emissions from farm animals contributes to global warming, said they supported Bush's line that the science behind climate change is unsure and Kyoto would harm the U.S. economy.
"If there's a problem it's best to research it more while developing our economies, rather than hurting our economies for a problem that doesn't really exist," Kaufman said in an echo of Bush's stated policy.
Pro-Kyoto campaigners have also protested at Bonn and so far all demonstrations have been peaceful. Radical environmentalists infiltrated a city of Bonn reception on Tuesday night and were forcibly ejected by security staff.
|
