NEWS ANALYSIS : U.S. Flexes Its Muscle Before Earth Summit

The centerpiece of the June Earth Summit, already denounced by environmental activists as a historic failure, has turned out to be a monument to the clout of the United States.

Thanks to the Bush Administration, government leaders will sign a global warming treaty that has none of the teeth sought by U.S. allies and trading partners in the industrialized world. It will include no specific timetable for stabilizing emissions, nor will it set mandatory emission levels.

Critics consider those omissions a grievous mistake. Over time, the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is expected to cause a measurable rise in mean temperatures, causing climatological havoc around the world.

Nevertheless, the treaty will mark a turning point in a debate that has gathered intensity for nearly a decade and seems certain to continue.

The deliberately vague framework agreement will “constitute a political commitment by the United States to bring down its output of carbon dioxide,” says William Nitze, president of the Alliance to Save Energy. Moreover, he says, the Administration may have been forced to accept heavier long-range obligations in order to escape the binding stabilization deadline.

“They might have lightened their burden by agreeing to a deadline up front and saying (the United States) would do nothing more for awhile,” he says. “As it is now, the agreement is to be followed almost immediately by more steps, including the presentation of a national strategy. In the end, the price for the compromise could be high.”

“It is a treaty worth having,” says James G. Speth, chairman of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality during the Jimmy Carter Administration. “But because of the United States, what could have been a giant step has become only a baby step forward.”

Politically, the eleventh-hour accord worked out this month was a tactical tour de force for the Administration. It averted chaos at the summit and attempts to brand the United States a world environmental pariah.

Getting an agreement that contains no firm timetables or emission targets was a White House victory that seemed unlikely until the negotiations in New York this month. Until then, the United States stood alone among world powers in opposing a commitment to stabilize the emission of greenhouse pollutants at 1990 levels by 2000.

But concerned that President Bush would stay away from the Earth Summit and thereby turn the massively publicized conference into a fiasco, European governments acceded to U.S. demands to abandon a binding reduction target and a firm deadline.

More than that, it was obvious that a global warming agreement without the United States would be nearly meaningless because the United States produces about a fourth of all carbon dioxide emissions.

It also was clear that the United States would be a key player in all other summit issues that have so far been obscured by global warming--most notably, decisions on the proposed transfer of funds and technology from the industrialized countries of the Northern Hemisphere to the developing nations of the south.

But the Administration’s victory may not be as complete as it appears.

Although the global warming agreement is effectively complete and ready for signing at the end of the two-week summit, a 900-page environmental charter called Agenda 21 must be completed by negotiators in Brazil.

There have been indications in recent days that European governments may attempt to incorporate their target and deadline on greenhouse gases into the Agenda 21 document.

Bush’s decision to attend the summit effectively closes a chapter that began with his August, 1988, campaign promise to hold a world environment conference at the White House and to attack the greenhouse effect.

Circumstances suggest that Bush was sincere in his pledge. In the early days of the Administration, the President reminded aides several times about those promises.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III, in his first public appearance after taking office, declared that action to address the global warming threat could not be delayed until all scientific uncertainties were put to rest.

But Bush found himself with a sharply divided Administration. William K. Reilly, chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, pressed for the United States to take the lead in reducing greenhouse-effect pollution.

White House Chief of Staff John Sununu, however, was belligerently skeptical of scientists who forecast a possibly devastating greenhouse effect. When Reilly made a speech laying out the same points made by Baker, Sununu “went ballistic,” according to one Administration source.

Later in the year, when the EPA chief headed for a major global warming conference in Holland, he was ordered to abandon his proposal to invite other governments to begin negotiations in the United States on a global warming treaty.

European governments at that conference backed a resolution calling for stabilization of greenhouse gas emissions by 2000, taking a political initiative that they maintained until they were faced down by the prospect of Bush ducking the Rio summit. Joined by the Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia and a few others, the United States succeeded in having the deadline eliminated.

Over the next two years, the United States continued bobbing and weaving through international negotiations, while proceeding with a billion-dollar research program into global warming.

While Administration lieutenants debated each other, the President stayed on the sidelines, delivering more than one speech doctored by Sununu over the objections of other officials.

Baker, meanwhile, recused himself from global warming deliberations on grounds that his private personal holdings could create a conflict of interest. That left Reilly increasingly isolated.

But after a massive assessment of global warming research by the United Nations-sanctioned Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Administration tacitly accepted the major scientific conclusions. It was still unwilling, however, to accept assessments by environmental groups and a conclusion by a panel of the National Academy of Sciences that major carbon dioxide emissions could be significantly reduced without heavy economic costs.

In the end, an interagency analysis showed that programs under way or awaiting congressional approval could take the United States within a whisper of the European goal of carbon dioxide stabilization by the turn of the century.

But even with Sununu gone from the White House staff, opposition to deadlines persisted.

Knowledgeable Administration sources cite two principal reasons:

First, the Administration did not want to override business and industrial interests opposed to targets and timetables, and saw little to be gained by doing so because critics would never give Bush their political support anyway.

Second, officials were concerned that if the targets and timetables were not met, others who signed the agreement could write it off as a failure, but the United States would face a deluge of environmental lawsuits for failure to comply.

When the stabilization deadline was abandoned in the final pre-summit negotiation, industry breathed a sigh of relief.

Some argue that in the long run, public environmental concerns and solid financial returns from energy conservation and renewable energy sources will be as important as the protocols to be added to the Rio treaty.

Southern California Gas Co. last month urged Bush to adopt the European target of carbon dioxide emission stabilization by 2000, and Pacific Gas & Electric called on him to consider such a step. Southern California Edison has said it will meet its customer demands in the years ahead through conservation measures and the use of renewable energy sources rather than through construction of fossil fuel plants that produce carbon dioxide.