Clinton’s 2 Paths to Environmental Cures

Pummeled over the last five days by America’s partners atop the global economic ladder, President Clinton is planning to deliver a firm defense at the United Nations today of his administration’s still-cautious response to fears of global warming, which aides said he considers a grave environmental, economic and national security threat.

But even as he calls publicly for a long-range solution that could take many decades to implement, privately, Clinton is taking a much more aggressive tack, going so far as to tell business executives and political contributors that dramatic measures--among them an overhaul of the nation’s gas-guzzling transit system--are required.

As the president and his aides prepare his most visible and perhaps most important address on international environmental problems, Clinton has in recent days said that Detroit must produce cars that either don’t burn fossil fuel--the electric vehicles just hitting the roads, for instance--or that burn it in a fundamentally more efficient way, according to participants at a fund-raising party held Monday at the home of Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.).

But Clinton’s speech today to a special session of the U.N. General Assembly is expected to stop well short of such dramatic assertions, presenting instead “his rationale for going slowly” in setting targets and timetables for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

Although his decision Wednesday to impose tough standards on air pollution took applauding environmental activists by surprise, the approach reflects what critics and supporters alike say is Clinton’s preferred political method: Finding a middle course and presenting it in public forums, while in private he tells those who urge bolder action that he believes in the ultimate correctness of their path.

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In this case, Clinton’s private support for an aggressive program to combat climate change--after dressing down some who had questioned him in public settings--succeeded in calming growing criticism of his approach.

“Privately, he has been very eloquent in describing how serious a problem global warming is,” said one Washington environmental activist after receiving a firsthand report of the president’s remarks on Monday.

According to this account, Clinton “said the United States and other industrialized nations must lead the way, and Detroit must remake our transit system.”

The president also was said to have quietly told Jiang Zemin, the president of China, that the greatest threat China poses to the United States is not military but instead its purchase of too many U.S.-made vehicles “and polluting the air the way we do.”

The issue of global warming, which many climatologists and other scientists believe is occurring as increasing amounts of fossil fuels are burned, is moving to the top of the international environmental agenda. The world’s nations are trying to complete by the end of the year a treaty that would lay out a course for restricting the carbon dioxide emissions given off in the burning of coal, oil and gasoline.

As it rises, the gas traps the Earth’s heat, much the way the glass of a greenhouse functions.

In his speech, which a senior advisor described as a “look ‘em in the eye, grab ‘em by the tie” address, Clinton will be speaking as much to the American people as to the diplomats in the General Assembly chamber, telling both audiences that “this issue demands our serious attention and demands action,” the aide said.

At last weekend’s Denver summit of the world’s eight industrial giants, and at Monday’s start of the special weeklong U.N. conference assessing the state of the global environment five years after the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the U.S. came under sharp attack for failing to adequately restrict emissions from power plants, motor vehicles and factories.