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- WORLD
Anti-green conspiracy revealed, 30 years on
Paris: A secret club of seven wealthy countries plotted to hamstring the first United Nations conference on the environment in 1972 to protect the nations' economic interests.
The "cabal", which called itself the Brussels Group, comprised Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the United States, New Scientist reports.
Representatives from these countries held a series of secret meetings in the run-up to the 1972 Stockholm Conference in which they decided to crimp the ambitious agenda of environmentalists and disregard concerns for the Third World, it says.
The evidence comes from papers that have just been released through Britain's "30-year rule", under which confidential official documents must be placed in the public domain after three decades unless they relate to vital national security.
A note written by a British Foreign Office public servant after an early meeting in July 1971 described the Brussels Group as "an unofficial policy-making body to concert the views of the principal governments concerned".
Referring to the likelihood of criticism "from the Swedes and others", the note urged that the group "not ... include awkward bedfellows".
The 1972 forum, formally called the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, was the first global conference on environment perils.
The conference's secretariat was headed by Maurice Strong, then head of the Canadian foreign aid agency. He campaigned for the agenda to be broad and ambitious and embrace issues that, today, are mainstream concerns, such as deforestation, urbanisation and development in poorer countries.
But the confidential papers say lobbying by the Brussels Group ensured the agenda was limited to a small number of subjects, such as cross-border pollution, and did not touch trade or economic activities.
Britain, for its part, campaigned on behalf of the controversial Anglo-French supersonic jet Concorde, then in production.
At the top of its list of subjects that it wanted excluded from Stockholm's action plan were controls on sonic booms and pollution in the upper atmosphere.
Although the Stockholm Conference's achievements are largely limited to high-minded declarations, the event at least launched a new agency, the UN Environment Program.
Agence France-Presse
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Anti-green conspiracy revealed, 30 years on
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