Administration Backs Off Global Warming Deadline

Two weeks after President Clinton called for an aggressive international program to fight global warming, his administration retreated Friday from its goal of reducing polluting emissions by 2000.

The administration’s new plan, if implemented, would delay until 2010 a deadline for an international reduction in the emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants.

In addition, it would allow maximum use of a program under which polluting companies may exceed allowable pollution standards in the United States if they help foreign companies reduce pollution elsewhere. And it would let nations exceed allowable pollution levels if they enforced stricter limits in the future.

The plan was disclosed in a State Department position paper prepared for international negotiations that begin Monday in Geneva.

Environmentalists responded with sharp criticism, saying that the plan represents a reversal from the tenor of remarks Clinton made last month in a speech saluting the wonders of the Great Barrier Reef off Australia, which he was visiting.

Global warming--or the greenhouse effect--refers to a gradual rise of the world’s average temperature, which appears to be proceeding even as regions record occasional cool spells. Over the past century, the average temperature at the Earth’s surface has increased by 1 degree Fahrenheit.

Global warming occurs when the heat of sunlight is trapped by gases such as carbon dioxide, which is given off by the burning of coal, oil and natural gas. Without such gases, the Earth would be a frozen wasteland, on average 60 degrees cooler than now. But excessive levels of these gases trap too much heat, causing the average temperature to rise.

The trend has provoked concern among scientists. An additional increase of even a degree or two could affect the environment, turning some cropland into desert, for example. A rise of a few more degrees could begin to melt icebergs, sending the sea level climbing over coastal areas, scientists say.

Next week’s negotiations are intended to bring agreement on a treaty to be completed at a global environmental meeting in Kyoto, Japan, a year from now. The pact would set specific national goals for lowering emissions of carbon dioxide, methane gas, nitrous oxide and chlorofluorocarbons.

The treaty would put into effect an agreement reached at an environmental meeting in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Under that accord, the participants pledged to lower emissions of so-called greenhouse gases to 1990 levels by 2000.

But the State Department said Friday that short-term targets taking effect before 2010 “are unrealistic and we cannot accept them.”

“Short-term targets would be unnecessarily burdensome to national and global economic growth and development. They would mean that few, if any, countries would ratify the agreement,” the department’s paper said.

Environmentalists took heart in July when Undersecretary of State Timothy E. Wirth declared support for mandatory limits on carbon gas emissions and again when Clinton, delivering his forceful speech on the environment in Australia, called for nations to “stand together against the threat of global warming.”

“A greenhouse may be a good place to raise plants. It is no place to nurture our children. And we can avoid dangerous global warming if we begin today,” Clinton said in the speech. “If we meet all these challenges, we can make 1997 a milestone year in protecting the global environment.”

After environmental groups were given the administration’s proposal for review, their mood darkened.

“The framework the administration wants to set up, involving binding targets, makes sense,” said Michael Oppenheimer, an atmospheric physicist and chief scientist of the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit organization that focuses on the links between the economy and the environment.

But the administration’s plan undermines that objective by delaying specific restrictions on pollution levels until 2010 and allowing countries to further delay their compliance with the targets, Oppenheimer said. “This has the effect of pushing the costs off to the next generation,” he said.

Eileen Claussen, an assistant secretary of state who prepared the administration’s proposal, said that the technical work needed to meet stringent emissions levels by 2010, as well as the difficulty of getting Senate approval of such a treaty, dictated the decision to seek a delay.

“The idea [that] we would be in a position to do something a lot earlier than that--I don’t see it,” she said.