As the fight to cool the planet warms up, Australia is the odd one out. JAMES WOODFORD examines how our low profile at Earth Summit II has tarnished our international image.

SENATOR Robert Hill faced heat from more than the baking New York weather on Wednesday. He was in the city to try to persuade representatives at the second Earth Summit of an argument they had no time for.

Australia was pushing its case against accepting binding targets for the reduction of greenhouse gases. Most of the rest of the world disagrees. For the first time in a long time, Australia is on the outer on an environmental issue.

Hill is convinced of the rightness of Australia's case, although he admitted he was moved as nation after nation lined up at the summit to tell of the drastic effects that global warming will have on its homes.

Worst hit will be the millions of islanders who live on atolls and outcrops that barely rise above the ocean. The summit was told that by the end of next century up to 80per cent of these will be swept away under the rising sea levels of climate change. The people who live on these islands will be the first to feel the impact of the refusal of industrialised nations such as Australia to slash greenhouse emissions.

The Samoan Ambassador to the United Nations, Neroni Slade, made it clear that although his people would be the first to suffer, the rest of the world would follow close behind. Small islands are microcosms of big continents, he said. Scientists believe the next century will be a meteorological rollercoaster ride, with more and fiercer storms and a worldwide sea-level rise of up to a metre. Fires will destroy rainforests and glaciated mountains will melt, destroying the beauty of national parks and leaving endangered species stranded.

Since the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, scientists working for the inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change have agreed that global warming is a fact. The message from this week's Earth Summit in New York is that politicians throughout the world now agree.

The final proof of that came when President Bill Clinton, the last important political leader to speak, threw his weight behind the islanders' position and pledged that the US would do everything it could to help them, including binding greenhouse gas cuts, and that Clinton himself would take personal responsibility for bringing greenhouse gas emissions under control. Clinton made some hefty promises, including a "strong American commitment to realistic and binding limits that will significantly reduce our emission of greenhouse gases".

"If the trend is not changed, scientists expect the seas to rise two feet [60 centimetres] or more in the next century," Clinton said. "In Asia 17per cent of Bangladesh, land on which 6million people live, will be lost. Island chains such as the Maldives will disappear." Robert Hill did not join the Australian delegation in the United Nations General Assembly chamber to hear Clinton's promise, one that puts increased pressure on Australia to fall into line. He was elsewhere, talking to other delegates at the time. But Clinton's word's capped a bad week for Hill.

On the first day of the summit the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, told world leaders that he saw climate change as the most important international issue.

"We are all in this together," he said. "No country can opt out of global warming or fence in its own private climate. We need common action to save our common environment." And in a blow to Australia - Blair had met his Australian counterpart, John Howard, and talked greenhouse only days earlier - he told the nations gathered at the summit that they had to stop pleading to be treated differently.

Later, speaking explicitly of Australia, the British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, said: "Australia is part of the same globe, so it will also get caught up in the issue of global warming. It will also find its children affected if we don't get on top of it. Australia has a part to play in making sure we reduce carbon dioxide." Australia does not deny that the world is in trouble.

"We have a responsibility to provide an effective, durable and truly global response to this significant issue," Hill, Australia's sole political representative at the summit, said on Monday.

But Australia is refusing to agree to the solution that the rest of the world is putting forward - binding international greenhouse reduction targets. Its argument is that we should be "differentiated" from the rest of the world because our economic system is uniquely dependent on fossil fuels like coal. Also Australia is asking the international community why we should shut down crucial parts of our economic base, such as our alumina industry, which produce large quantities of greenhouse emissions, when they will simply be replaced by similar industries overseas. The Federal Government says any replacement operations in the Third World would probably not be operated to Australia's high environmental standards.

However, Australia is finding little support. According to the climate policy director of Greenpeace International, Bill Hare, even nations such as New Zealand, Japan, Canada and Norway, which would all prefer to see Australia's policy of differentiation implemented, are falling into line under intense international pressure.

On Tuesday, New Zealand told the summit that the US position, of binding but flexible targets, was the most "intellectually coherent" that had been advanced.

"New Zealand accepts that Annex 1 countries [which include Australia, the US and Britain] must take the first steps," the New Zealand Environment Minister, Simon Upton, said. "But those first steps have to lead somewhere and in due course include developing nations."

Japan's Prime Minister, Ryutaro Hashimoto, said Tokyo was committed to a successful conclusion of the Climate Change Convention Conference to be held in Kyoto this December, including greenhouse emission reduction targets. Australia wants not only to be treated differently but also to be able to set up programs that allow nations to pay for improvements to greenhouse-producing industries overseas and then to be able to count these improvements as credits for themselves. This idea is called "joint implementation" and reduces the cost of reducing greenhouse emissions.

A senior official in the Australian delegation to the summit says that instead of spending tens of millions of dollars reducing greenhouse emissions at a particular plant in Australia, under the policy it would be possible to go to an extremely inefficient and polluting operation in the Third World and, for a fraction of the cost, achieve at least the same greenhouse reduction.

Australia is pushing for any such greenhouse cuts to be included as a "credit" to Australia, allowing it to leave untouched its local industries, which would be more expensive to overhaul. The policy would spare local industry from expensive upheavals and would help developing nations.

However, according to the official, the question raised by such a policy is: would it only take away all the "low-hanging fruit" - all the easy projects, all the cheap projects?

Australia says it would not, but the policy's critics, such as Hare, say it would, and they add that the resulting greenhouse reductions would be extremely difficult to quantify.

Industrialised nations cannot afford to have parties to the treaty opt out of binding greenhouse reduction targets, Hare says. "Every country must do its bit - there's no way out of it."

Hare believes Australia is diplomatically isolated and that on the international stage Hill appears "defensive".

"Countries are now explicitly antagonistic towards Australia," he says.

Hill says the world has to treat Australia fairly, and it is simply not fair for one nation to pay vastly more than others to tackle a problem.

The Australian delegation is pushing ahead with its plans for joint implementation, establishing a task force in Howard's office and making overtures to nations such as Indonesia and China. "Countries like Costa Rica are very keen," the official says. "What it does is reduce the costs very substantially for us. Kyoto is the first brick in the pillar and if we get it wrong the whole thing is buggered."

THIS morning, the Earth Summit is winding up and the world leaders are making a last-minute attempt to gain enough consensus to be able to release a joint statement. Delegates such as Hill are confident a statement will be possible, but it is likely to happen at the last moment, and only as a lowest-common-denominator document.

Asked by the Herald what had been the biggest surprise of the conference, Hill said it was the pervasive sense of pessimism. One of the most moving statements came from the President of the Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, who spelt out a true tale of environmental woe.

"From the former Soviet Union we have inherited the resource- and energy-wasteful economy, where natural resources were considered to have no cost and to be practically inexhaustible," he said. "More than 25billion tons of accumulated wastes cover the territory of 130,000 hectares of famous Ukrainian soils. Apart from the difficulties related to the complex process of a market transformation of economy, the problem of Chernobyl continues to be a substantial obstacle for attaining the sustainable development of the country."

While the Ukraine is an extreme case of environmental degradation, there has also been a general agreement this week that the words and promises of the Rio summit have turned out to be largely hollow. The threats to the environment have not abated, and - with the exception of a small decline in the rate of growth in population and the rate of deforestation - the world's ecological indicators are rushing downwards.

Even though population growth has slowed, by 2025 there will be 8billion people. Any reduction in deforestation is insignificant in real terms because the current rate of destruction is already so unsustainable. More than half of the world's forests have been destroyed. In this area, at least, Australia is one of the good guys.

Blocs of nations such as the European Union and individual States such as Canada have been pushing for the formulation of a new forest convention. However, Australia and most conservationists say the convention is merely another ploy to delay real action.

While Australia suffered humiliation on Monday, under the glare of the world's media for its stand on greenhouse, Tuesday was Canada's nadir, with Greenpeace - the first conservation group ever allowed to address the UN General Assembly - making a damning speech on Canada's logging. "As we sit here today, clear-cut logging is under way in the last great stands of the northern rainforests on the Pacific Coast of Canada and the US," the executive director of Greenpeace, Thilo Bode, said.

On the same day, conservationists had only praise for Australia's efforts on forests.

The Worldwide Fund for Nature's senior forest officer, Steve Howard, said he was impressed by a forest presentation given by Hill on Monday.

"I got a positive impression of him and he did seem completely genuine, which is quite significant. At least he's got a positive and a negative; a lot of people here have nothing to say."

Next stop Kyoto in December, then Earth Summit III in 2002.

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