More Than Hot Air Needed in Resisting Global Warming

Last week at the United Nations’ second climate convention in Geneva, Timothy Wirth, the undersecretary of state for global affairs, committed the United States to “realistic, verifiable and binding” targets for reducing the kinds of air pollution that threaten to warm the global climate. Many experts see the burning of fossil fuels as the chief culprit.

Environmentalists are not holding their breath in anticipation of quick action, for the Clinton administration refused to define those targets at the conference, saying they would be specified when economic analyses were completed sometime within the next 18 months. A few cynics are betting that it will be at least five months--past the November election--before the administration gets specific.

Still, Wirth’s statement is a welcome departure from previous U.S. policy, which has stressed only voluntary approaches to reducing pollutants. The U.S. commitment is expected to put pressure on Europe and Japan to agree to specific reductions. Though the European Union had called for large cuts in emissions, it has only hinted that they should be legally binding, while Japan, which will host the next global climate convention, in 1997, has spoken only of “morally binding” limits.

The Clinton administration is attempting to win favor from business by signaling that it intends to use market-based approaches, like the trading of pollution permits, to help American industries reduce emissions in whatever fashion they deem most efficient. That makes sense. But Wirth’s announcement in Geneva still cost the administration some political capital. Opposition came from some oil, power and automobile groups (one, the Washington-based Global Climate Coalition, warned that “millions of jobs” could be lost) and from six Democratic senators who wrote a letter to President Clinton calling it premature to agree to any “numerical targets . . . because an adequate basis of analysis and assessment is not complete.”

The senators are correct in saying that scientists have yet to fully understand global warming. Most researchers concur that the surface of Earth (especially in the northern latitudes) has warmed by as much as two degrees Fahrenheit in the last century and that these small increases could prompt fairly large global changes, like altered plant growth or the spread of malaria, cholera and other diseases. But authorities don’t know whether these temperature changes are attributable primarily to accelerated carbon dioxide emissions or whether other factors, such as changes in land use, play a significant role. Still, most scientists say there’s little doubt that humans are augmenting a 10,000-year-old warming trend by burning fossil fuels, causing heat to be trapped in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Inevitably, global warming will produce winners and losers in nature, as some plants and animals thrive and others die. But in political culture, policymakers ought to strive to keep the human damage to a minimum.

The responsibility for doing this falls largely on the United States, for it burns more fossil fuel than any other country. Washington assumed some responsibility in Geneva last week by at least acknowledging that climate change is happening and that something must be done about it. But the Clinton administration should commit itself to specific, legally binding targets. Otherwise, the 1996 Geneva conference may begin to look like the 1992 one in Rio at which nations promised reductions in greenhouse gas emissions that most of them have yet to carry out.