US backs UN call to protect oceans
Trump wages fight against regulations, not climate change
UNITED NATIONS, June 10, (AP): The 193 UN member nations issued an urgent call for action Friday to reverse the decline in the health and productivity of the world’s oceans — with the United States backing the action plan but rejecting its support for the Paris agreement to tackle climate change.
Ministers and diplomats burst into applause as the final document was gaveled to approval by consensus at the end of the first-ever UN conference on oceans.
It recognizes the critical importance of the world’s seas to the future of the planet: Covering three-quarter of the Earth, they supply nearly half the oxygen that we breathe, absorb over a quarter of the carbon dioxide we produce, provide food, and play key roles in water cycles and the climate system.
The government leaders called on people and organizations everywhere to take action to reverse the threats from plastic garbage, illegal and excessive fishing, rising sea levels that could wipe out small islands, and increasing acidity of ocean water that is killing marine life.
While the call for action was unanimously approved, countries are allowed to express reservations afterward. Egypt and Russia also dissociated their governments from specific provisions, but the United States was the only country to oppose the Paris accord. And when France and the European Union spoke after the US and urged implementation of the climate deal, they received loud applause.
US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State David Balton, who is in charge of oceans and fisheries, noted President Donald Trump’s announcement on June 1 that the United States will withdraw from the Paris agreement or renegotiate US participation, which has already been rejected by other countries.
But Balton said the US remains committed to work inside and outside the UN to address “threats to the ocean and to promote its conservation and sustainable management for this and future generations.”
General Assembly President Peter Thomson, a veteran diplomat from Fiji, said his goal for the five-day conference was to start the reversal of the decline of the oceans.
“I am 100 percent satisfied,” he said. “From this point onward nobody can say they are unaware. The bar has been raised on global consciousness and awareness.”
Thomson stressed when asked why there was no serious fighting over the call for action that the ocean is the common heritage of mankind and restoring its health is a great challenge of our time.
Dying
“If it’s dying, it’s dying on all of us,” he said. “When it comes to the ocean there’s no them and us. It’s all of us or nothing.”
The call for action, while not legally binding, urges all “stakeholders” to take a series of urgent actions to heal the oceans.
Meanwhile, while President Donald Trump’s beliefs about global warming remain something of a mystery, his actions make one thing clear: He doesn’t consider it a problem for the federal government to solve.
Trump’s recent decision to pull out of the Paris climate deal was just his latest rapid-fire move to weaken or dismantle federal initiatives to reduce carbon emissions, which scientists say are heating the planet to levels that could have disastrous consequences.
Trump is waging war against efforts to curb US dependence on fossil fuels. He’s done that through executive orders targeting climate change programs and regulations, massive proposed spending cuts and key appointments such as Scott Pruitt as chief of the Environmental Protection Agency.
To what degree Trump will succeed remains to be seen. Despite the fanfare of his Paris announcement, including a pledge that his administration will halt all work on it, formally removing the US from the accord could take more than three years. Rescinding the Clean Power Plan, president Barack Obama’s signature measure to curb emissions from coal-fired power plants, likely would require three years. Trump’s budget, which would slash funding for climate research and assistance to cities preparing for weather-related calamities, needs approval from Congress, where resistance is strong.
Still, the sharp change in course is being felt in ways large and small, down to the scrubbing of climate change information from federal agency websites. Environmentalists are predictably outraged. Even some Republicans are taken aback.
“This is a repudiation of 45 years of steady improvement in the enforcement and rigor of laws to protect the environment in the US,” said William K. Reilly, who led the EPA under president George H.W. Bush and is chairman emeritus of the World Wildlife Fund.
Trump’s administration reversed Obama’s moratorium on leasing federal lands for coal mining, joined with Congress to kill protections of streams from coal mining waste, stopped tracking the federal government’s carbon emissions and withdrew a requirement for more emissions data from oil and gas facilities. A rollback of automobile fuel-economy standards is under consideration. His proposed 2018 budget would cut climate and energy research spending in numerous agencies, including a two-thirds reduction at EPA.