A Very Live Issue

Global warming has been Al Gore’s signature issue since he portrayed it as a planetary threat in his 1992 book, “Earth in the Balance.” However, in his speech Thursday at the Democratic convention, the presidential candidate devoted merely a sentence to the supposedly dire phenomenon.

That was smart politics. Eyes glaze over when leaders promise to rein in something so big. Even the staunchest environmental activists admit that if Congress enacted their “green” agenda tomorrow, it would not actually reverse the rise in greenhouse gases that is causing the Earth and its atmosphere to cook--little by little, but enough to flood low-lying lands in the next few decades.

Still, while Gore is downplaying global warming on the stump, the issue is far from dead in the policy arena. Quietly but steadily, a bipartisan consensus is emerging in favor of taking moderate steps to reduce, if not reverse, the planet’s warming.

One sign of political progress is George W. Bush’s recent acknowledgment that global warming is a genuine and growing problem. The Texas governor and Republican presidential candidate has supported plans to regulate fossil fuel pollutants in his state, a major oil producer, and, on a personal note, is building an energy-efficient family home.

Another indicator of growing consensus is a Senate bill, S 2718, that would give tax breaks to businesses that boost the energy efficiency of their buildings. The measure has a broad political constituency, from Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) to Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). Yet another sign of moderate consensus-building is a fossil fuel-reduction program that Clinton administration officials intend to present at a United Nations summit on global warming next month in Lyons, France. U.S. officials will ask international negotiators to grant the United States credit for using forests and farmers’ fields to sop up carbon dioxide, easing demands to cut automobile and smokestack emissions.

Under the so-called Kyoto Protocol, U.S. negotiators agreed to a cut in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions to 7% below the 1990 level by 2010. Congress never accepted the deal, and the U.S. is unlikely to reach the goal. The new Clinton administration proposal would halve the required reductions by crediting the more than 300 million tons of carbon dioxide that U.S. forests and farms absorb each year.

Some environmentalists portray the proposal as a cynical ploy by the Clinton-Gore administration to pose as a leader in the effort against global warming while failing to support real reductions. In fact, the plan is pragmatic. The administration has zero chance of getting Congress to approve the Kyoto Protocol as currently worded because such compliance, it’s almost universally believed, would increase energy costs enough to crash the economy. Counting trees and farms would increase chances of congressional support for at least some of the treaty by cutting the cost and suggesting an international credit-trading scheme that would benefit farm and forest states.

So long as the administration continues to stand behind other methods to reduce fossil fuel emissions, like eliminating the $20 billion a year in federal subsidies to dirty coal plants and other fossil fuel industries, its new emissions trading plan deserves support.