Getting Real on Global Warming

The Clinton administration is pushing a greatly scaled-down global warming plan, having failed utterly to get Congress to even consider grander reductions of U.S.-generated greenhouse gases. Environmental activists and the leaders of other developed countries find the proposal, which would give the United States a credit for its still-vast forests, pitifully limited. But its great attraction is its viability, especially in Congress.

The new plan is on display at a meeting of more than 5,000 diplomats, climate experts and business leaders that began this week in The Hague.

The European Union and low-lying nations like Bangladesh, especially vulnerable to the potential effects of global warming, lashed out Thursday against the U.S. plan, saying it would let Washington avoid making energy consumption cuts at home.

The diplomats are right in charging that the plan retreats from the so-called Kyoto Accord, signed in Japan by the Clinton administration three years ago, which said the United States should, by the year 2010, reduce its fossil fuel emissions to 7% below the 1990 level.

This time around, Washington wants to get credit for methods other than reduced factory and automobile emissions. Specifically it wants unlimited credit for preserving “carbon sinks,” mainly forests that swallow up excess carbon dioxide in the air, and for “pollution trading,” a scheme whereby the United States could earn credit for helping developing nations like Russia invest in energy-efficient new technologies.

The U.S. position is clearly self-interested: It pleases domestic constituencies like auto makers, which don’t want steep increases in fuel economy standards. And it allows Washington to benefit from the preservation of huge swaths of forest during the Clinton administration.

The Hague summit’s stated goal--to prepare politicians to plan for events 100 years hence--is unachievable. Indeed, the summit may well collapse in discord before its scheduled conclusion next Friday, given the European Union’s unexpectedly sharp dismissal of the U.S. proposal.

Even so, the U.S. plan to create short-term economic incentives that encourage long-term ecological behavior makes sense. Washington’s plan, clearly aimed at domestic constituencies, nevertheless proposes ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions that could be every bit as effective as, say, banning sport-utility vehicles. Helping developing nations build energy-efficient factories and protecting the Amazon and Orinoco basins in South America, known as “the lungs of the planet,” from slash-and-burn logging would genuinely and significantly reduce global warming.

As Frank Loy, the chief U.S. negotiator, put it in a press briefing last week: “The Earth does not care. The Earth benefits if you reduce emissions, wherever they are.”