The U.S. has a unique opportunity in Johannesburg to refocus the attention on development. The Bush administration has been chastised by many Europeans for not caring enough about sustainability, especially in its rejection of the Kyoto Protocol. The cynical Europeans are probably right that the U.S. decision was an expression of rather narrow U.S. interests.
But in Johannesburg the American decision could be recast as an attempt to focus on the most important issues on the global agenda, basically championing fundamental issues such as clean drinking water, sanitation, health, and poverty reduction. Such a move would regain for the U.S. the moral high ground. When the U.S. rejected the Kyoto treaty last year, the EU talked endlessly about how it was left to them "to save the world." But if the U.S. is willing to commit the resources to ensure development it might actually end up being the savior.
Bjorn Lomborg is the director of the Danish National Environmental Assessment Institute, and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cambridge University Press 2001.
