Beilenson ‘Frustrated’ by U.S. Stance at Earth Summit

WASHINGTON — As a congressional observer at the Earth Summit, Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson said he was “embarrassed and frustrated” that the United States had turned “a great opportunity to lead” on such issues as biodiversity and global warming into “a huge fiasco.”

“We were all a little embarrassed and frustrated being down there as Americans,” the Los Angeles Democrat said of his 13 House colleagues who returned Monday from a taxpayer-funded, four-day trip to Rio de Janeiro. He was sharply critical of the Bush Administration’s stance.

“We do a better job of at least trying to protect the environment here at home than other countries do. It would have been entirely natural and proper for us to have taken a leadership role on these issues,” said Beilenson, long an advocate of strict environmental protection.

“To the contrary, the conference is turning into a huge fiasco for us and for the President because we are being seen--and I think correctly so--as dragging our feet and being opposed to many of the key decisions that are being made there.”

The Republican Administration has come under fire for alone refusing to sign a binding treaty on biological diversity, insisting on watering down a treaty on global warming and expressing reservations about a declaration of environmental principles. Bush has insisted that his policies are necessary to protect the interests of America and its workers first.

Beilenson said the Administration’s public relations effort had been particularly inept--”taking something which should have been a positive and making it a negative.”

Nonetheless, he said the experience, which included attending plenary sessions and meeting with members of parliaments from around the world, was valuable.

“You just come back with a far wider and deeper understanding of what’s going on but particularly of other people’s points of view,” he said.

In addition, he said the lawmakers supplied much-needed moral support to Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William K. Reilly and other U.S. negotiators at the summit who are “under siege at this point.”