Ozone Accord Spurs Drive on Global Heating

For 10 days last month, delegates from nearly 100 nations labored on the banks of the River Thames across from Parliament to write a new chapter in environmental diplomacy.

They succeeded.

Agreement was reached on unprecedented amendments to the Montreal Protocol binding the industrialized West and developing nations in a single global cause--protection of the Earth’s eroding ozone layer.

But even before the ink dried on the new accord, world leaders were looking ahead to a major international conference scheduled for 1992 in Brazil to fashion a broad framework treaty to address an even more daunting environmental threat--global warming.

“We have established here the model for the way in which we’re going to have to carry out future environmental diplomacy . . . (to) save this small and fragile planet,” declared Chris Patten, Britain’s environmental secretary.

Equally enthusiastic was Mostafa K. Tolba, who, as executive director of the U.N. Environment Program, shepherded the talks here to a successful conclusion.

“We are starting a new era of not only cooperation but, really, partnership,” Tolba said. “What we have been aspiring for has come true in a legally binding treaty.”

But that achievement, significant as it was, pales by comparison with the hard work that lies ahead in fashioning a treaty on global warming.

Diplomats caution that the world has not yet entered the era sought by environmental gadfly Jeremy Rifkin, who has called for a new politics that is “species-oriented instead of ideologically oriented.”

There is much to suggest that even though the world may be confronted by a common threat, its peoples may not pull together to meet that threat.

Differences in how nations view environmental problems, and the unequal sharing of the costs and benefits of international accords, complicate environmental diplomacy.

Should a nation go along with efforts to allay the greenhouse effect if it knows that global warming might bring it more abundant harvests? Should poor nations struggling to raise their standards of living spend money to reduce ozone depletion so that fair-skinned Europeans don’t get skin cancer?

The theory of global warming holds that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide, produced mostly by the burning of fossil fuels, have produced a so-called greenhouse effect in which the Earth’s surface traps more of the sun’s rays, raising global temperatures. This will lead to such things as rising sea levels and the spread of disease, it is feared.

While few participants in the London conference doubted the genuine concern over the Earth’s deteriorating environment, success in strengthening the Montreal Protocol was possible largely because practical substitutes for ozone-destroying substances are near.

There are comparatively few ozone-destroying substances. They include man-made coolants--called chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)--used in air conditioning and refrigeration, as blowing agents in foam manufacturing and as solvents.

Chemical manufacturers in the United States and Europe are well on their way to developing and marketing substitutes, known as HCFCs, that are only one-tenth as damaging to the ozone layer.

And while it is relatively simple to address a single issue such as ozone depletion, the agreement nearly came unraveled over the issue of how industrialized nations would transfer that technology to the Third World.

The question: When does the need to protect the world’s environment take precedence over private property rights--in this case the right to protect patented HCFC technology?

Manufacturers say that after investing millions of dollars in research and development of patented HCFC alternatives, they do not want to give the results away to Third World nations and enable them to build plants and undercut sales.

Developing nations say they are burdened by foreign debt and cannot forever be buying products from the West. They want to make the products themselves. If they cannot, they will not join in the fight to save the ozone layer.

It was a dilemma that India’s environment minister, Maneka Gandhi, said is certain to dog future negotiations involving global warming.

“Either you (sell us) the technology or you change your laws or you change your patent rights,” she said. “Start working on it! This is a new century coming up in which every single conference which will take place is going to take place for survival.”

Gandhi referred to global warming and the new technologies that will be needed to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas.

“In every case it will involve a transfer of knowledge,” she said. “The whole 21st Century’s survival will be based on the (transfer) of knowledge.”

Negotiators settled on somewhat vague language that, at least for the moment, appeared to resolve the dispute.

But the drafting of a global-warming treaty will present far greater obstacles, in part because the phenomenon, unlike ozone depletion, has no single cause.

To turn down the temperature on global warming will get at the very heart of national economies.

The greatest single contribution to global warming is carbon dioxide emissions, which come from the burning of fossil fuels like coal, gasoline and oil--the energy of modern society and the fuels that the Third World counts on to raise standards of living.

Will people drive less or use less energy to heat their homes? Will the Third World turn aside the demands of burgeoning populations for a higher living standard?

William K. Reilly, chief of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and head of the American delegation, said that global warming will put environmental diplomacy to a severe test.

“These are enormously complicated issues,” Reilly said in an interview. “They have nuances that involve economic advantage for countries. . . . We’re dealing here with very complex problems that involve the interrelations between economic development and environmental protection.”

The United States is attempting to draw the line when it comes to future international cooperation to arrest global warming. It rejects the suggestion by European governments that the ozone agreement has set a precedent for action on global threats like the greenhouse effect, deforestation and the extinction of species.

What concerns Washington is any impression that its contribution to a $240-million ozone-restoration fund, earmarked to help Third World nations comply with strict new environmental controls, obliges the United States to make similar contributions to other funds that may be set up to reduce the so-called greenhouse effect.

“We don’t want to go back home and find that we have put a siphon into the U.S. Treasury,” said one American.

For that reason, the United States placed four conditions on its participation. Ozone depletion met those four tests, including a finding that there is “conclusive scientific evidence” on what causes it and the threat it poses to the planet. That is not the case with global warming, in the U.S. view.

Many also question whether addressing the greenhouse effect could meet two other tests established by the United States--that the program and actions being financed must reasonably be expected to solve the problem, and that the funds needed “must be limited and reasonably predictable.”

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