The Entire Civilised World is Shocked Beyond Civilised Expression - 30 March 2001

I'm looking at a political cartoon in a Washington 'paper. It's by one of the few craftsmen left - either in Britain or America - in this, the dark age of comic draughtsmanship.

This particular American artist - Oliphant - has, I believe, a contract with at least one British paper and this cartoon may well have been reproduced there.

I'm looking at a brilliantly-drawn couple of gross creatures - huge, burly, gangster-like men in black shirts, thin white ties, loud capacious suits.

One, bearing the tag "coal lobby" on his coat tails, is cleaning his fingernails with the blade of a ferocious knife, his fat buddy "oil lobby" is tilting his peanut-sized head and his cigar down fondly at a tiny creature squeezed between the bulging rumps of the gangsters.

The tiny figure is George W Bush and he's holding a telephone and the fat kindly- looking buddy with the cigar is evidently dictating to the tiny Mr Bush whom to call and what to say.

"Ask for," the fat man is saying, "Mrs Christine Todd Whitman, please."

Now remember she was the governor of New Jersey who resigned in order to become President Bush's head of the department of the environment. She's one of the rare Republicans who knows thoroughly both sides in the passionately debated issue of the environment and its preservation.

And since she's a Republican she's assumed by some Democrats and the Greens to be a catspaw of the fossil fuel barons whom President Clinton and Mr Nader's radicals have succeeded in representing down the years as the evil face of capitalism.

The cartoon. The fat man leaning down and dictating in a kindly way to the tiny figure cringed over the telephone says: "Ask for Christine Todd Whitman, please. Say 'Christine I've been hearing some very convincing arguments about the positive aspects of carbon dioxide'."

I've not seen and I can't imagine a cartoon that so mercilessly expresses - as good cartoons should - the essence of a crusading cause. The cause is the crusade to reduce the emission - the giving off - of carbon dioxide from power plants.

Environmentalists and many independent scientists are convinced that carbon dioxide is the number one villain among the poisonous or "greenhouse" gases that trap heat in our atmosphere and are mainly responsible for the slowly but inexorably rising temperatures around the globe and which portend disastrous consequences for our climates, our agriculture, our healthy survival in a world of poisonous atmosphere, flooding oceans, expanded deserts and other catastrophes. Now that is giving the cause its most extreme definition.

I might say, before we go on to seek salvation, that the choice of greenhouse gases as the cause of global warming is not absolutely proven and of course it's rejected as a skewed or alarmist theory by many industrialists who would see their industries wilting, if not collapsing, with a ban on the emission of the gases that provide our power and therefore our livelihoods.

Now, we're revisiting carbon dioxide because that cartoon is an extreme expression of a line that I took, a line that was taken a week or so ago by the entire English-speaking press everywhere I looked. In British, American, Australian papers, not to mention French, the headlines are much like the last one in the Washington Post: "Bush ditches pledge to cut emissions".

This past Thursday there was a meeting in Washington of environmentalists from many nations. It was called to discuss global warming in general and in particular a treaty signed in Kyoto, Japan four years ago by over a hundred nations, binding them to reduce emissions of the heat-trapping gases by 5% by the year 2012.

Doesn't seem much to ask but even the most rabid or ultra green expects to be able to run his automobile and heat his home and use electric light until some fossil-free fuel becomes a universal replacement for the detested but at present overwhelmingly necessary coal and oil.

With that grim, sad fact in mind President Bush announced, just before Thursday's meeting, that the United States will not now support the Kyoto Treaty and will not send it to the Senate for ratification.

What an outrage! The entire civilised world is shocked beyond civilised expression. The European Union expresses deep concern over Mr Bush's action. The chancellor of Austria says the United States must fulfil its duty.

Right after Mr Bush's announcement that America would not now reduce the emission of carbon dioxide Mrs Whitman reminded the press that the Senate, during the Clinton administration, had voted 95 to 0 against ratifying Kyoto until poor countries - what the UN asks us to call "developing" countries - begin to reduce their emissions of heat-trapping gases.

Now some inquisitive listener may ask: How did this all come up?

Well we should have feared or anticipated this whole episode and the demonising of President Bush four months ago. If any of us in the media had had the wit to notice just exactly what President Clinton was so hastily signing, apart from pardons, on his last night in the White House.

In a talk at the end of January I said that a departing president has the privilege, between administrations, of signing executive orders which, unless they're vetoed by his successor, will have the force of law.

They're usually small, benign acts - an increase in tolls on a federal highway - something that will not offend or disturb the next administration.

I never dreamed he would think up anything so mischievous, so potentially humiliating to the incoming president as an order pledging the banning of carbon dioxide emissions in federal power plants.

Mr Clinton knew, as well as anybody, that there wasn't a single senator of his party or the other that would vote to carry out that order by ratifying the Kyoto Treaty.

He also knew, which no newspaper or television channel I know has pointed out, that it is not and has never been the United States against the world.

When I said the Kyoto Treaty "bound" a hundred nations to reduce the carbon dioxide I should have said they signed to say they would. Not a single industrial nation - including the pious denouncers of Mr Bush - has ratified the treaty. Only Australia, Canada and Singapore are ready to do so.

When the 97 other sinners find themselves without sin, will be time to deplore the centralness of the United States.

Meanwhile we are left to reflect that the only American who gave a pledge on carbon dioxide was Mr Clinton and that even after he's gone his fingerprints are still impressed on the presidential desk.

I cannot end this time without paying tribute to a man who will be forever a tantalising footnote to history.

Charles Johnson died this week at 76 - the president, for the past 30 years, of the International Flat Earth Society.

His secretary announced she has every intention of rousing the 3,500 members of the society to, as she puts it, carrying on his mission, which is to discredit the widely-held view, first propounded by a Pole - Nicolaus Copernicus - that the Earth is a sphere turning and orbiting in space round the Sun and replace it with the scripture-sanctioned view - the correct universal view so long ago as 1543 - that the Earth is a flat disc floating on primordial waters.

President Johnson, Texas born, spent most of his life as an airplane mechanic in San Francisco so that anyone who assumed he was confronting a scientific ignoramus would soon get an earful of aviation science.

But the science that explained the revolving sphere of an orbiting Earth was really a lot of nonsense invented to deny the plain and unanswerable facts of the Book of Genesis to begin with and the New Testament to end with, since if there'd been no up or down in the universe, Jesus could not have ascended to heaven.

When it came to explaining such awkward facts, or as Mr Johnson would say "theories" about the phenomenon of sunrise, sunset, he was ready for all comers. The sun rising and setting is a simple optical illusion.

How about the famous landing on the moon? It never happened, Mr Johnson held, it was faked in an airplane hanger in Arizona, enacted to a script written by - wait for it - Arthur C Clarke.

Mrs Johnson, his late wife, was a believer too - the flat earth was very obvious to her. She was born and lived in Australia and never had any sense that she was standing upside down.

Mr Johnson would, with little encouragement, go on about the ancient lineage of his society - long before the publication of the Bible. The flat earth doctrine was preached in Greece 6,000 years ago.

Copernicus and his revolving ball theory added nothing to human knowledge, Mr Johnson said, though in fact I think we should credit Copernicus with one thing - the invention of the word "revolution", first coined to express the motion of the earth in orbit around the sun.

Mr Johnson knew very well what he was about and was not without a salty humour - he called Copernicus "Co-pernicious" - and he used to sit on the porch of his desert home and smoke and point across the miles and miles to the very straight line of the horizon.

"Any fool," he'd say, "can see that it's flat."

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