Agenda 21

One of Rio’s major achievements became – at least in the U.S. – a bizarre political caricature.

Agenda 21 was a visionary, totally non-binding guidebook for environmental action in the 21st Century. It called for concerted action on climate, clean energy, empowerment of women, protection of habitat, abolition of illegal logging and fishing, and much more.

The guidebook may have been unrealistic on the very day it was published, but in the U.S., far right media figures and politicians saw Agenda 21as the guidebook for the sinister one-world government they’d always warned about.

Radio/TV firebrand Glenn Beck branded the document, which was endorsed by Bush the Elder and 177 other heads of state, as the Scripture for a new religion. Senator Ted Cruz cited the Agenda’s call for the abolition of golf courses, grazing land and paved roads. Others said Agenda 21 prescribed genocide as a population control measure.

Of course, scholars who had actually read Agenda 21 could find no hint of these things.

Failed Kyoto Protocol

The most famous and enduring product of Rio was the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, (UNFCC) which begat annual climate confabs which begat 1997’s Kyoto Protocol. The Agreement was under fire from the start for its sole focus on industrialized nations. Developing nations, even giants like India and China were let off the hook, with no requirements to reduce carbon emissions.

Global climate talks

UNFCCC also brought us the COPs. That would be the annual Conference of the Parties, known to most everyone as the "UN climate talks." Crucial meetings included the 2009 Copenhagen COP, where high hopes for progress were both dashed and overshadowed.

Climate denial groups released what they said were the highlights of thousands of climate scientists’ emails, suggesting that climate science was a cynical scam. Multiple investigations eventually cleared the scientists of everything except poorly-chosen email language and a little juvenile humor.

In the 2015 Paris COP, the Parties had reason to, ummmm, celebrate an agreement that saw comparatively strong commitments to greenhouse gas reductions. This was partly due to a strong showing from Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry.

Flip to climate denial

Of course, Donald Trump’s capture of the White House in 2016 flipped the U.S. into the denier camp.

Rio also saw the creation of the Convention on Biological Diversity, a quiet but vital body that monitors and identifies ecological hotspots; and the Statement of Forest Principles, a first crack at rulemaking for everything from turning the boreal forests into bathroom tissue to turning the Amazon into, well, stuff for sale on Amazon.com.

Rio also brought a new term into widespread use: “Sustainable development” became the buzzphrase for just about every constituency at Rio: If you’re a paper company, “sustainable development” meant how much Charmin you could squeeze onto a roll before you’d entertain the notion of restraining your business.

If you’re an environmentalist, it meant how much restraint you could demand on timber and paper companies. Or whether gasoline prices, closely following 1989’s Exxon Valdez disaster and the first Iraq war, would continue to rise past the inflation-adjusted $1.95 a gallon.

Greenwashing

Greenwashing also came of age at Rio and at the 1990 Earth Day festivities, prompting PR campaigns suggesting that “BP” also stood for “Beyond Petroleum” and British American Tobacco’s acronym also stood for “A Better Tomorrow.”

Make no mistake, the Rio Earth Summit was a good thing. It focused worldwide attention on environmental problems and solutions in a way that doesn’t seem to happen anymore. But did it really solve any problems?

It’s 30 years later, and we don’t know yet. And that’s a problem.