U.S. Insists on Loopholes for Toxics

President Clinton, on the really big stuff, has been frozen for nearly eight years by right-wing antagonism, interns bearing pizzas and an industry base determined to set its own rules globally. It’s now the eleventh hour for Clinton’s legacy. But he still has a ripe opportunity to put impeachment and other mishaps behind him and achieve a legacy he can be proud of: a meaningful worldwide treaty on organic pollutants.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union undermined its own potential for economic growth and democratic reform because of an ideological focus on world domination and the arms race. When President Reagan said in a speech at the Berlin Wall, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall,” he spoke for the world. By at long last letting the wall come down, Mikhail S. Gorbachev may be remembered as the single most important force for ending the Cold War.

Now it is Clinton who stands behind a wall erected to support the aging U.S. industrial base, namely the auto, coal, oil and energy industries. These dinosaurs pushed the Clinton administration to insist on loopholes in the global-warming treaty so large that the 181-nation talks broke off last month in the Netherlands. The nations of the European Union pulled the Americans far toward closing the loopholes on limits to greenhouse gas emissions, but time is running out for an agreement to be struck.

Meanwhile, this week in South Africa, many of those same nations are convening to hammer out details for the treaty on persistent organic pollutants. This is a global effort to rid the world of the most toxic chemicals that accumulate in the food chain and body tissue (including yours and mine), causing a wide range of environmental and human health maladies like diabetes, cancer and birth defects.

Sadly, the U.S. is again the ringleader pushing for loopholes for its chemical manufacturers, fighting an all-out ban on dioxin and secretly lobbying Brazil, India and South Africa as a means to divide countries that are pushing for a ban on these pollutants.

This is not new behavior by the U.S. For three decades, regardless of the party in control of the White House, the U.S. has lobbied to weaken international treaties. It has convinced other nations that they must lower their standards in order to get U.S. support, and subsequently failed to ratify the watered-down treaty. Three examples: the Treaty on the Law of the Sea, the Convention on Biological Diversity and its Biosafety Protocol, and the Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes of 1989.

The tragedy of this is that opposition to these international treaties serves only our calcified commercial interests of yesterday. It hurts the competitiveness of the U.S. by stalling development of advanced technologies that not only serve as the solution to environmental problems but also as job creators in the export market. It hurts the health of people here and around the world, and it undermines the U.S. role in spreading democracy and environmental security globally.

By pushing for strong global warming and persistent organic pollutant treaties and abandoning the 30-year history of undermining agreements on behalf of yesterday’s industrialists, Clinton could go down in history as the global leader who took the first important steps against these threats. He could follow in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson, who will forever be associated with the founding of the United Nations, even though his proposal for the League of Nations collapsed years earlier.

Mr. Clinton, tear down your barriers to these treaties.