Avoiding an Overheated World

After years of ignoring pleas to enlist in the fight against global warming, the White House has budged.

Washington now tells the United Nations that it will spend $75 million to help Third World countries cut their production of carbon dioxide and other gases that have wrapped a blanket around the Earth. Scientists worry that the blanket is trapping the sun’s heat in a “greenhouse effect” that could trigger punishing increases in global temperatures.

Yet Washington once again balked at committing itself to specific emission limits of greenhouse gases, offering instead a list of recent actions that should reduce emissions of the most damaging of them, carbon dioxide.

So the $75-million contribution produced movement, if not momentum, toward allowing a U.N. conference on the world environment in June to do more than go through the motions in the face of persistent major disagreements.

The struggle to cope with global warming represents an opportunity to learn whether humanity can discipline itself to prosper economically without burning itself out environmentally.

The June conference in Rio de Janeiro hopes to produce broad agreement among world leaders on the need for historic changes--changes in the way people live that will be necessary in order to sustain economic growth. Developing countries have insisted they will not be pioneers in curbing production of warming gases if the United States keeps resisting efforts to do the same.

Americans, after all, contribute one-fourth of the Earth’s entire output of “greenhouse gases.” One reason is that carbon dioxide is produced by burning fuels such as oil and gasoline and America lags most industrial nations in energy efficiency.

Among the actions that have been taken to improve on that record are energy conservation programs, undertaken most notably in California, by public utilities. Another is a new federal transportation law that gives air quality planners a stronger voice in transportation planning. This should produce energy savings because of the strong link between air pollution and emissions from car and bus engines.

A grudging budge? Perhaps, but compared to next to nothing--which is about all the White House has ever offered--it’s a virtual bonanza.