Frosty Reception Awaits Global Warming Accord

For President Clinton to win ratification of the international global warming agreement--which in its current version is all but doomed in the Senate--it seemed clear Thursday that he must bring major developing nations into the pact, win broad and deep support from the American public and counter opponents’ claims that it will deal a blow to the U.S. economy.

For opponents of the treaty to knock it down, they need only maintain the status quo.

By head counts from all quarters Thursday, the Senate is resoundingly opposed to the pact reached Thursday in Kyoto, Japan--for now.

As an executive of a coal association predicted, not only can opponents count on almost all of the Senate’s 55 Republicans but also on every Democrat from an energy-producing state, from North Dakota and Montana to Louisiana. That provides the accord’s foes a cushion well beyond the 34 votes--one-third of the Senate’s 100 members--needed to block ratification.

Facing those odds, the White House came out firing on Thursday.

“I see already the papers are full of people saying, ‘The sky is falling! The sky is falling! [The treaty’s] a terrible thing,’ ” Clinton said.

But, he continued in a speech in Miami, “Every time we’ve tried to improve the American environment in the last 25 or 30 years, somebody has predicted that it would wreck the economy. And the air is cleaner. The water’s cleaner. The food supply is safer. There are fewer toxic waste dumps. And the last time I checked, we had the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years.”

Signaling his administration’s plans to rally support for the treaty, he concluded: “So don’t believe the skeptics. Give us a chance to make the case.”

The treaty is not likely to be submitted to the Senate for at least a year.

The administration and other supporters of the pact--as well as its opponents--say they are far from fleshing out the strategies for what is likely to be a roiling debate, lasting well beyond next year, over how the nation uses and consumes energy, in particular the coal and oil that are building blocks of the U.S. economy.

The accord, completed Thursday morning by representatives of 166 nations, sets specific goals for reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and five other gases that are widely considered responsible for what many scientists believe is an increase in global temperatures.

Under the agreement, the United States over the next 15 years would bring its emissions to 7% below their 1990 levels.

The emissions stem from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas, all of them carbon-based fossil fuels, in the wide gamut of the nation’s industrial and commercial activities--as innocuous as running errands around town in an automobile to the powering of massive generators that feed electricity across the country.

Negotiators were unable to reach agreement on what role would be assigned to developing nations, particularly such budding industrial giants as China and India, which over coming decades are expected to grow so drastically that their gas emissions will pass those of the already industrialized nations.

Critics of the pact argue that without curbs on these nations’ emissions, they will be able to avoid making potentially costly investments in modern, emissions-limiting technology and thus gain a competitive manufacturing advantage over the United States.

At the insistence of China and several other nations, even voluntary participation by developing countries, which were not obligated under the original United Nations mandate establishing the negotiations, was ruled out in the final hours of the talks.

“We still have to press for meaningful participation by key developing nations,” Vice President Al Gore said Thursday in a White House ceremony. “Let’s be clear; we will not submit this agreement for ratification until key developing nations participate in this effort. This is a global problem that will require a global solution.”

With an eye on the battle to win Senate approval, Gore added: “The stakes are simply too high, environmentally, economically and morally, for us to allow the special interests to get in the way of the common interests of all humankind.”

Gore was joined by Deb Callaghan, president of the League of Conservation Voters, who pledged that “environmental and public interest groups will rally local support for this historic treaty at the grass-roots level.”

But achieving the U.S. goals without any change in the nation’s energy appetite will require sharp shifts in corporate and individual behavior, said Fred Palmer, chief executive of the Western Fuels Assn., a cooperative whose members feed coal to utility plants in 14 states. And that impact, he said in forecasting strategy by the pact’s opponents, “gets conveyed to the Senate.”