Europe Sees Climate Pact as Flawed but Vital

Long before the Iron Curtain fell 12 years ago, Western Europeans could get a whiff of what might have been their future.

Coal smoke in Prague left soot in a visitor’s nostrils. Exhaust-spewing jalopies on the streets of Budapest cast a pall of sulfurous smog over the city. From East Berlin to Bucharest, factories belched so much ambient poison that respiratory ailments were epidemic in industrialized cities.

Pollution was hardly limited to Eastern Europe, but the unrestrained post-World War II buildup behind the Cold War barriers provided a shocking harbinger for the whole continent of the risks to health and quality of life from ignoring the environment.

Aid from affluent Western states has helped clean up the east, and air quality is noticeably better. Still, Europeans are not yet breathing easier. Years of global brainstorming, arm-twisting and compromise have produced what most concede is an imperfect agreement to deter climate change, one that has been abandoned by the planet’s biggest polluter--the United States.

Many of the European Union countries now taking the Bush administration to task for spurning the Kyoto Protocol, which sets a timetable for reducing carbon dioxide emissions, were as critical of the plan’s shortcomings as were U.S. delegates when the deal was reached in the Japanese city in 1997. There is universal agreement that the accord’s failure to address emissions from developing nations such as China and India will limit its effectiveness.

But Europeans are now staunchly defensive of the Kyoto formula on the theory that even a flawed plan to combat global warming is better than no plan at all.

“Kyoto is the only tool we have to deal with climate change, and we’ve spent 10 years already to bring it to where it is,” Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson said at the conclusion of a European Union summit here Saturday.

EU President Romano Prodi vowed to see to it that all 15 EU states ratify the protocol next year, saying the world’s wealthier states have “a moral obligation and a political duty to set an example” for developing nations.

An EU delegation will be embarking on a global mission to persuade Kyoto signatories outside Europe to abide by the protocol, Persson said. The diplomatic endeavor will cover Japan, Canada and Australia.

U.S. Called On to Take Issue Seriously

Europeans--who share U.S. concerns about the limitations of the Kyoto pact but remain committed to it nonetheless--harbor an unspoken suspicion that President Bush is hiding behind Kyoto’s drawbacks to evade the costs and political pitfalls of compliance. And environmental activists are openly skeptical of the U.S. position, demanding that Bush show the world a better way to protect the global climate if he doesn’t like Kyoto’s terms.

At the EU summit here, leaders hailed Bush’s assertion that he is as committed as they are to reducing carbon dioxide emissions. But their praise of the atmospherics of what remains an impasse appeared aimed at keeping pressure on Washington to show it is serious about doing its part.

Prodi celebrated Bush’s decision to send an observer delegation to a July 16-27 U.N. climate conference in Bonn despite persistent indications that the U.S. position on the Kyoto pact is unlikely to change. The EU leaders appeared to be trying to look on the bright side.

“It is important that we have managed to create a situation in which Bonn will not be an occasion for blockage but an opportunity for cooperation,” said German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer.

Although Europeans agree with Bush that the protocol’s failure to address “greenhouse gas” emissions in developing countries is a disadvantage, they argue that getting other big polluters on board will be possible only if the current signatories set the right example.

The Bonn climate conference is expected to put the finishing touches on the protocol to transform it into a treaty that can then be submitted to each country’s legislature for ratification. The EU states, many of which have already built energy programs around their assigned carbon dioxide reduction targets, unanimously vowed to see the treaty come into force.

Environmental groups were quick to applaud the EU promise to hold to the Kyoto terms, which also set reduction targets for five ozone-depleting emissions other than carbon dioxide.

“WWF is delighted that the EU did not blink,” said Andrew Kerr, spokesman for the World Wide Fund for Nature’s climate policy campaign. Greenpeace likewise hailed the EU, warning that “the Bush administration’s isolationist policy will ultimately fail.”

Those engaged in the nuts-and-bolts work of meeting Kyoto targets by expanding clean, renewable energy sources explain Europeans’ deeper commitment to the protocol as an outgrowth of life on a crowded continent with a culture more accepting of regulation and taxes.

“When you live in a densely populated area, you realize you have to make sacrifices for the benefit of the general population,” said Inge Thorup Madsen of the Danish Ministry for Energy and Environment. “We in Europe are used to more regulation than Americans because we don’t have so much space for everyone to be individualists. We are also used to paying more for government services so that everyone can live equally.”

Public awareness of the hazards from air pollution soared a decade ago when travel-happy Westerners rushed to get a glimpse of the former Communist countries that had long been off their itineraries. “It was a shock for most people and made them realize we had to do more” to protect the environment, Madsen said.

That readiness to spend for the common good is visible beyond the huge tax bites taken on payday--50% to 60% personal income taxes in most EU countries. Gasoline costs at least $4 a gallon throughout Europe, and electricity, though in surplus, also is more expensive than for most U.S. households.

Positions Said to Not Be Too Far Apart

Bush initially justified his decision to dump the Kyoto Protocol by saying the slumping U.S. economy and California energy crisis made compliance too costly, although he has since argued against the terms of Kyoto rather than its objectives. That shift from the general to the specific gave EU leaders hope that they eventually can sway the U.S. to live up to the Kyoto commitments or shame the world’s wealthiest country into cutting emissions its own way.

“We both have the goal of addressing climate change, and in this we are not so far apart from one another,” Fischer said, contending that the debate is not whether but how to combat global warming.