More Than Just Hot Words

A United Nations conference on how to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming ended Saturday after failing to achieve any legally binding agreement on measures by which developed countries would reduce emissions.

U.S. diplomats were roundly excoriated for failing to even consider reducing domestic greenhouse gas emissions as much as most European nations already have. Nigeria’s environment minister, Sani Zangon Daura, said the United States had caused a “plague of climate change” as harmful as the colonization of Africa. A delegate representing low-lying island nations already being flooded because of global warming fumed, “We are fighting for our livelihood and they [the U.S.] are fighting about a change in lifestyle.”

However, in technical sessions that took place behind the scenes, the United States, France and Britain bridged some of their differences, agreeing on ways to enforce reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. The U.S.-European compromise eventually foundered on opposition from Germany, but it showed that future summits could build on common principles. The summit also saw a U.S. pledge to provide up to $1 billion to help island nations and other countries especially susceptible to the effects of global warming take steps like building dikes and moving populations away from low-lying seashores.

The pledge recognized the importance of adapting to global warming rather than only trying to prevent it. Even if all nations were to agree to significantly reduce their greenhouse gas emissions now, global warming would continue and nations would still have to compensate for its effects.

Legislators in Congress were right to restrain Clinton administration delegates from agreeing to the reductions the European Union wanted. Because of the full-bore growth of the economy in recent years, the United States would have had to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 35% from current levels just to meet an agreement it made in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, to cut its emissions by 7% from their levels in 1990. However, it would be irresponsible for Congress to continue ignoring the problem.

The summit was not the “fiasco” that some environmentalists called it. As Eileen Claussen, president of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, put it Friday, the negotiations were “more complex than those that spawned today’s international trade rules, and that process took more than 10 years. So it should come as no surprise if the approximately 180 governments attending the summit do not agree on every issue in this round.”