Clinton Urges Effort to Halt Global Warming

President Clinton called Wednesday for a new commitment to halt global warming, saying that unless humans reduce emissions of gases that cause temperatures to rise, the melting of polar icecaps will produce catastrophic consequences around the world.

Clinton made his remarks near the conclusion of his state visit to this environmentally aware South Pacific island nation.

After an official dinner hosted by New Zealand Prime Minister Jenny Shipley, the president rushed back to Washington late Wednesday night to supervise the federal response to Hurricane Floyd.

“We’ve done everything we know to do,” Clinton told reporters here Wednesday after consulting with Vice President Al Gore and James Lee Witt, head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, about the storm bearing down on the U.S. East Coast.

In his environmental address, Clinton painted a dire picture of the consequences of global warming.

“Unless we change course, most scientists believe the seas will rise so high they will swallow whole islands and coastal areas. Storms, like hurricanes, and droughts, both will intensify,” he said. “Diseases like malaria will be borne by mosquitoes at higher and higher altitudes and across borders, threatening more lives--a phenomenon we already see today in Africa.”

Clinton said the chief barrier to reform is not “the huge array of wealthy vested interests and the tens of thousands of ordinary people around the world who work in the oil and the coal industries,” but the outdated notion that energy consumption is a barometer of wealth.

“The largest obstacle is the continued clinging of people in wealthy countries and developing countries to ‘a big idea’ that is no longer true--the idea that the only way a country can become wealthy and remain wealthy is to have the patterns of energy use that brought us the Industrial Age.”

New advances in alternative energy forms make it possible, he said, “to grow the economy faster while healing the environment and that, thank God, it is no longer necessary to burn up the atmosphere to create economic opportunity.”

Clinton also announced the release of seven declassified digital images of the Dry Valleys region of Antarctica, detailed “snapshots” of about 7,500 square miles of the rare “cold polar desert” that he said will enable scientists to better understand the ecological dynamics of extreme environments and their response to climate change.

Accompanied by his daughter, Chelsea, and his mother-in-law, Dorothy Rodham, the president also toured the International Antarctic Center, the staging area for scientific expeditions to the South Pole.