Europe Seeks to Sway U.S. to Meet Higher Standards for Emission Cuts

The squat white machine looks like a throwback to an earlier era--back in the 1950s, when a washing machine was a luxury in many homes and it was loaded through a front door. Through the glass, the clothes could be seen tumbling in sudsy water.

But here it is, on display at the Bielinsky appliance store on Acherstrasse, the latest in energy-saving household appliances and one of the newest warriors in the battle against global warming.

The washer, manufactured by AEG Co., handles about 11 pounds of clothes in barely 12 gallons of water, which is one-third the water the company’s machines used 10 years ago. Less water means less heat, which means less energy--just one kilowatt each load. That in turn means less demand from electricity generators that disgorge greenhouse gases, so called because they trap the Earth’s heat like a greenhouse and contribute to global warming.

The lower water and energy needs set “a very high standard, and it’s a normal standard in Europe,” said Reiner Koenig, head of AEG’s environmental domestic appliance department.

It is also a standard that goes to the core of the debate between the United States and its European allies over the effort to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. Representatives of more than 150 nations are meeting in Kyoto, Japan, next month to chart a course intended to restrict the gases spewed into the atmosphere.

European nations argue that by 2010, the industrial giants can well afford to cut their emissions of three of the most damaging gases to levels 15% below 1990 amounts.

But in the United States--where standard washing machines use about 40 gallons of water, more than three times the AEG standard--business and industry are warning that such cuts will bring economic ruin. The Clinton administration has proposed stabilizing emissions at the 1990 level.

How can two vast communities so reliant on energy and living by the same faith in democracy and the marketplace differ so widely?

Cultural differences come into play.

Europeans readily use bicycles, trains and trams. World War II deprivations and their aftermath have instilled in Europe a respect for conservation--even on such a small scale as the use of timers to switch off apartment building lobby lights.

Population density makes long commutes rare, and when Europeans do turn to automobiles, they are more likely to drive high-mileage models running on diesel fuel, or gasoline that costs as much as $5 a gallon.

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But Europe has undergone sweeping changes that go well beyond bicycles and revolutionary washing machines. Many regions have abandoned coal-burning electricity plants, which give off carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas.

In Britain and the Netherlands, electricity is increasingly generated by natural gas. France relies on nuclear power to generate 80% of its electricity.

In the United States, by contrast, coal remains the fuel powering most utility plants, according to the U.S. Energy Department. Last year, 56% of the nation’s electricity was generated by coal, up from 50% in 1980. Nuclear power provided 22% of the supply in 1996, while hydroelectricity accounted for about 11%.

Germany also has swung around to natural gas in a big way, thanks to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

For four decades in East Germany, there was a simple way to control apartment heat, even in winter: Open a window. The crude method was tolerable because, for political reasons, East German energy prices were kept artificially low.

The communist nation generated its electricity in plants that burned lignite coal, which gives off twice as much carbon dioxide as natural gas.

Soon after the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, a reunified Germany began modernizing the eastern regions. Lignite-powered plants were replaced with natural gas facilities. Old factories built with Soviet equipment were closed because they could no longer compete with modern facilities in the West.

Energy prices were allowed to rise, and everything from lightbulbs to boilers were upgraded with energy efficiency in mind.

The timing could not have been better, because 1990--when most of the old, polluting factories were still running--became the base year by which nations negotiating the treaty are to measure their progress.

In the late 1980s, East Germany burned 300 million tons of lignite a year. Today’s reunified Germany is burning no more than 130 million tons of lignite a year, said Franzjosef Schafhausen, a senior official in the German Environment Ministry.

The old furnaces operated at 60% efficiency, meaning that 40% of the energy in the lignite escaped to the atmosphere. The new natural gas furnaces operate at nearly 95% efficiency, Schafhausen said.

The result of the switch is a 46% decline in carbon dioxide emissions in eastern Germany and a 12% decline in Germany as a whole as of 1995, the Environment Ministry reported in April.

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By comparison, emissions in the United States are believed to have risen about 7% since 1990 and are expected to rise 13% by 2000. Trying to do something about it has put the Clinton administration in a vise--one driven home in a simple sentence uttered by Vice President Al Gore.

Last month, while administration officials engaged in fierce internal debate over the position U.S. negotiators would take when they arrived in Bonn for global warming talks, environmental leaders met with Clinton and Gore to insist on cutting emissions below 1990 levels.

Gore’s response: “We don’t have the permission from the American people.”

He contends that the public would not support measures needed to discourage the use of fossil fuels and cut emissions to the degree proposed by the Europeans.

“The public in Europe is over the hump in their understanding of the issue,” Derrick Forrister, chairman of the White House Climate Change Task Force, said later. “There clearly seems to be a much stronger feeling of urgency.”

For one thing, Europe’s parliamentary political structures give heads of government greater authority than that of an American president who has to work with a Congress dominated by the opposing party, said Alden Meyer, director of government relations for the U.S. Union of Concerned Scientists.

If German Chancellor Helmut Kohl “wants the Parliament to tighten building insulation standards, they do it,” Meyer said. But beyond that, there is a “cultural willingness to act” on environmental matters.

Indeed, said Michael Behrens, head of English-language programming for German government radio, “there’s a sort of ecological correctness in Germany” that has grown out of the density of its population--80 million people in an area the size of Montana--and a recognition that an environmental hazard in one community can harm neighboring towns.

In the United States, a broad coalition of industrial users, energy producers, farmers and labor unions says taxes imposed to quell energy consumption could raise the price of a gallon of gasoline by 25 cents.

Environmentalists, however, say economists’ models show that technological advances could actually reduce the costs of cutting emissions so much that taxes would be unnecessary.

The administration is somewhere in between. While not conceding that any taxes would be necessary, officials argue that the overall gas increase could be cut to perhaps 2 1/2 cents a gallon.

In Bonn on a recent sunny morning, meteorologist Thomas Klodt was showing visitors the solar power panels his company, SolarWorld, has constructed atop a flat factory roof to generate and sell electricity to the German power grid. It is the world’s largest privately owned installation of electricity-producing solar cells--an array so vast that a flock of geese once mistook it for a lake and landed.

But more than just providing power, the installation illustrates the public-private partnership that is allowing Germany to reduce its emissions by an anticipated 4%--even without the pressure of an international agreement.

The installation doesn’t come cheap. The company has invested about $2.5 million, Klodt said, and “we don’t know when the break-even point will be.”

Germany, like the United States, gets a minuscule 0.002% of its electricity from such solar projects, according to Scott Sklar, executive director of the Solar Energy Industries Assn.

But Germany is much further along in connecting such plants to the national electric grid, and its commercial use of solar power is “well ahead of the United States,” said Paul Maycock, a private consultant in Warrenton, Va., specializing in photovoltaic systems.

But there’s a catch: Coal-fired electricity is still cheaper for the grid--so the Bonn city government, reflecting the political pressure for environmental action, chipped in and made up the difference in cost.

The city passed the higher charges on to residents.

The cost: about 7 cents more a month.

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Reane Oppl of The Times’ Bonn Bureau contributed to this report.