Bush Pledges Action Toward Acid Rain Pact

President Bush, traveling to Canada for his first foreign visit since the inauguration, pledged Friday to negotiate a treaty limiting the emissions that cause acid rain, but he declined to set a timetable or specify the size of the reductions he has in mind.

Although Bush’s pledge remained vague, Canadian officials accepted it as a major step toward an agreement on acid rain that they have been seeking with the United States since 1979. The Reagan Administration’s insistence on the need for further study before any action could be taken blocked discussions on such an accord for the last eight years.

“It wasn’t so long ago that Canada was going it alone” on acid rain, an obviously pleased Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said in a joint press conference after the two leaders met. Bush’s statements, he said, “represent quite substantial progress.”

Contrast in Rhetoric

While Bush has taken no action yet on the acid rain issue, his rhetoric has been enough of a contrast with Reagan’s to guarantee him a friendly reception here.

Despite a temperature of 13 below zero when Bush arrived in mid-morning, small groups of people stood along the motorcade route to wave greetings, in contrast to the demonstrations that met Reagan on his last visit here.

After an airport greeting complete with red carpet and an honor guard of red-coated Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Bush and a covey of top aides held two hours of meetings with Mulroney and his Cabinet in the government’s official guest house, followed by a “working lunch” across the street at the prime minister’s residence.

Afterward, Bush told reporters the visit “symbolizes the importance that we place on the relationship with Canada.”

Acid rain, he said, “has been a problem” in U.S.-Canadian relations--one which he is “determined to move towards solution.”

Solving the problem, however, will require difficult political choices at home, as Secretary of State James A. Baker III conceded when he briefed reporters on the Bush-Mulroney talks and his own meetings with Canadian Foreign Minister Joe Clark.

“We’re going to have a difficult . . . political situation,” Baker said, in determining “who’s going to pay the price” for reducing the pollutants.

The cost of acid rain clean-up, which is expected to be several billion dollars, “affects different regions of the United States in different ways,” Baker said.

The Canadians have asked the United States to reduce by more than half the emissions of sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, the two main pollutants that form acids when combined with water in the atmosphere. Such reductions, which would involve increased use of smokestack “scrubbers” and other pollution-control devices, would be particularly costly to the Midwest, where coal-burning power plants and industrial burners emit large amounts of the chemicals.

Prevailing winds carry pollutants from Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and neighboring states east and north to New York, New England and Canada, where acidic rain and snowfalls have been widely blamed for damaging forests and poisoning lakes.

Canadian officials estimate that U.S. emissions account for roughly 70% of their acid rain problems. And in the United States, emissions of sulfur and nitrogen oxides have been on the rise. Nitrogen oxides, in particular, have been increasing because they are a prime component of automobile exhaust.

Progress in Congress on acid rain reduction has been stalled for several years because of opposition from Reagan Administration officials, the coal and utility industries and members of Congress from the Middle West.

Baker also said that he had talked with Clark about Central America and that Bush had spoken with Mulroney about that region, telling him that the Administration hopes the Western Hemisphere’s nations can “all adopt . . . a policy that represented a diplomatic approach to the issue.”

In addition, he implied that Clark had mentioned the possibility of Canada’s participation in a proposed U.N. force to monitor the Central American peace process, if such a force is eventually raised.

Baker seemed cool to the idea of a U.N. force. The United States would be concerned about any U.N. accord that would weaken pressure on the Nicaraguan government to improve human rights conditions domestically, he said.

“We should not substitute . . . any lesser standard” for the goals that have been agreed on by previous meetings of Central American presidents, he said.

Bush and Mulroney, who share a generally conservative ideology, clearly appeared to enjoy their meeting. Mulroney won a second term as prime minister shortly after Bush’s victory last November in an election that turned into a referendum on the U.S.-Canada free trade agreement that both men support.

The two leaders joked together during their joint press conference on the lawn of the prime minister’s residence. At the end, Mulroney, speaking in both French and English, asked for a final question. Bush, picking up the cue, responded: “ Mais oui, fine pour moi , it’s colder than hell.”