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Bonn & the UNFCCC Our Green Bike Tour is showing Europeans that there are folks in the United States who want to battle global warming. It's something that our national policy does not always demonstrate.
Since 1995 the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has organized yearly conferences around the world to deal with the consequences of human interference with the earthıs atmosphere. The most famous of these was the Kyoto meeting in 1997. That meeting produced a protocol for mandatory reductions of greenhouse gasses (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, etc.). President George W. Bush refused to endorse that protocol, soon after he took office. That refusal to go along with every other developed country in the world, is one of the reasons European nations are angry with the United States.
On Thursday about noon, Ed Woolsey and I rode a bike trail along the Rhine River from Bonn to the small village where
UNFCCC is located. I had been planning the visit for weeks with Barbara Black, whose job is to work with non-governmental organizations such as Greenbike.
"Are you the bikers?," was the first question from a small pack of journalists who were waiting along the river at the rear entrance of the UN facility. This was the second time that the media came out to see the solar-powered bike. Like the first, in
Apeldoorn, they took loads of pictures and talked to us about why we thought making this journey would help combat global warming.
Just after we arrived, Ms. Joke Waller Hunter, the executive director, bicycled up to meet us along with a number of her staff for a well-staged photo opportunity. After the still pictures and after riding the solar bike around the grounds so the TV could get a moving shot, we sat down to coffee and cakes.
Kevin Grose, manager of Information Services at UNFCCC, has a brother in the College of Medicine at the University of Iowa. He talked about family visits to Lake Okoboji.
Early this month, the UNFCCC received a report from our government on our view of global warming. That report said the Bush administration now agrees global warming is caused by humans and that the consequences will be serious. According to a June 3, 2002, New York Times article, among those serious consequences will be "disruption of snow-fed water supplies, more stifling heat waves and the permanent disappearance of Rocky Mountain meadows and coastal marshes."
It doesn't say that the United States will do much about it.
Our visits on this bicycle trip demonstrate what we should be doing about global warming. Next time I will write about the efforts of the small city of Hamm, our stop on Saturday.
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