Barbara Sumner Burstyn: Pollution problems masked by a smokescreen of jargon

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Who's to blame for global warming? If you follow the news media in New Zealand, you could be forgiven for thinking that farmers were at fault.

After all, they're about to be levied with a flatulence tax to fund research into the livestock methane emissions deemed responsible for global warming.

In Toronto, going by the city's media coverage, you would be more likely to blame barbecues and lawnmowers. In Bangladesh, the wet-rice cultivators get the blame.

But it's like that classic carnival trick: the bait and switch. While you're focusing on the individuals - on farmers and backyard barbecuers as culprits for global warming - maybe you won't notice how the most polluting country in the world avoids all responsibility.

While a good portion of the Western world is figuring out how to reduce its emissions, President George W. Bush has a better idea. He's changing the language. It seems the real problem is not the state of the environment but the words used to describe it. White House strategists have dubbed it "the environmental communications battle".

Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, told Administration officials to use the term "climate change" instead of "global warming" because, while global warming connotes something catastrophic, "climate change sounds like a more controllable and less emotional challenge".

It seems hiding in plain sight is an American specialty. Take President Bush's clear skies policy. The policy, which is being called an air polluter's plan (as opposed to an air pollution plan), trumpets the value of controlling smokestack emissions in the US while, in reality, it actually lowers the allowable emissions bar and reduces standards for big industry.

Or the healthy forests initiative. This new legislation, under the guise of clearing fire hazards, is allowing large timber companies to move into vast areas of unspoiled old-growth American forests. Under the policy, more than 90 million ha of previously protected land will be opened up to extractive industry.

Or the Everglades Forever Act. After pressure from the sugar industry, the newly revised law delays for 10 years the clean-up of polluted water flowing from cane fields into the dying Everglades.

But some did see hope in the failure (by just four votes) of the President to open up 9.5 million ha of Alaskan land for oil drilling. That was until they discovered he had a trump card up his sleeve, another 3.6 million pristine, drillable ha that fell outside the agreement.

The truth is that if there's money to be made, the environment is expendable. Traditional producers of the very fossil fuels that contribute most heavily to global warming - oil, gas and coal - are on a roll, sustained not only by an avalanche of subsidies but by some of the most lax environmental regulations in the Western world.

Not that America is without regulatory bodies. The Environmental Protection Agency is about to release a major, 600-page report on the environment. Unfortunately, according to a New York Times investigation, a large section linking global warming to smokestack and tailpipe emissions was cut to a single paragraph deeming climate change an innocuous scientific challenge.

Democrat Senator Joseph Lieberman was quoted as saying: "This is an Administration that lets its politics and ideology overwhelm and stifle scientific fact". He went on to report that the Environmental Protection Agency had refused to analyse legislation that he and Republican Senator John McCain sponsored to limit emissions of carbon dioxide.

Dr Stephen Schneider, one of the world's most vocal experts on global warming, calls the Bush Administration (and the Howard Government in Australia, for that matter) climate monkeys. As in "see no climate, hear no climate, speak no climate".

Sadly, it's not just the US that's at risk from this philosophy. With the increasing decamping of big business to the developing world, where the labour comes cheap and environmental standards are even lower than those in America, it's envisioned that new industrial revolutions could mean a quadrupling of carbon dioxide levels worldwide.

Add that to data produced by the World Meteorological Organisation, which indicates temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere in the 20th century are likely to have been the highest in any century during the past 1000 years, and it's clear that no individual farmer paying a tax for farting sheep, or a barbecuer cancelling a backyard grill, will make one bit of difference.

Of course, this shift to blaming the individual is not across the board. Some individuals are being carefully shielded from their responsibilities. Namely four-wheel-drive owners. They're not piloting the most polluting vehicles since the car was invented; they're patriots, consuming gas for the good of the country.

The four-wheel-drive is so important to the US Administration that it's changed the law so that small businesses can deduct the entire price of their behemoths from their taxable liability. As Schneider says, the Bush Administration never saw a tailpipe emission it didn't love.

But the last word should go to the Hummer, the world's leading domestic gas guzzler. Next to a picture of the vehicle traversing wild, open country are the words "Big is the new Small". If you don't think that's hiding in plain sight, you should have your eyes tested.