On Warming, Bush Is Out of Step

By the looks of his global warming plan released Feb. 14, President Bush thinks climate change is nothing to worry much about--at least not until long after he leaves office.

While much of the rest of the world continues to work toward ratifying the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement mandating an average 5.2% reduction of greenhouse gases over 1990 levels by the year 2012, Bush has outlined voluntary incentives and tax breaks he “hopes” may slow the increase. Rather than calling for actual reductions in gases, Bush is focusing on reducing “greenhouse gas intensity”--the volume of emissions divided by economic output. If that fails to do the job by 2012, he’d support a reassessment then. “I will not commit our nation to an unsound international treaty that will throw millions of our citizens out of work,” Bush said.

What he doesn’t seem to grasp is that, throughout the country, an increasing number of Americans want the treaty--or at least its more immediate, limit-setting approach. They don’t buy the president’s contention that curbing greenhouse gases would wreak economic chaos, and they believe scientists’ warnings that the buildup of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere brings risks of increasing droughts, dangerous storms, floods and disease. Their concerns have sparked a new movement that may soon leave our president in the dust. Across the country, in city halls, at corporate offices and on college campuses, people are going ahead with plans of their own to limit emissions of carbon dioxide, the main contributor to climate change.

To date, 116 cities and counties, including such unlikely candidates for environmental radicalism as Toledo, Ohio and Decatur, Ga., have pledged to cut their carbon-dioxide emissions. Some, including Seattle and Salt Lake City, have set targets well beyond those outlined in the Kyoto Protocol. Several local governments have already taken decisive actions toward this goal, investing in conservation, public transportation and alternative fuels. In San Francisco last November, voters overwhelmingly approved a $100-million revenue-bond measure promoting solar and wind power. Boston, meanwhile, plans to convert its bus fleet to hybrid vehicles and eventually to fuel-cell power.

Equally dramatic are actions by several large U.S. corporations, whose CEOs have shown that capping carbon-dioxide emissions as soon as possible is hardly a fringe concern. (After all, no less radical a group than the World Economic Forum has called global warming the greatest challenge we face.) DuPont has pledged to slash emissions by 65% over 1990 levels by 2010 and claims it has already gotten more than halfway toward that goal while improving its energy efficiency. BP Amoco has committed to a 10% reduction by 2010, and Royal Dutch/Shell Group hopes to meet a similar target next year.

Scores of college campuses are on the same course, completing greenhouse-gas inventories and, in some cases, sharply cutting fossil-fuel consumption. Several campuses have managed to reduce carbon emissions even as they’ve used more energy by investing in more efficient heating, lighting and air-conditioning systems that eventually pay for themselves.

The campus movement began in earnest in 1999, when Tufts University President John DiBiaggio pledged the university would start working immediately to meet the Kyoto target. Since then, enthusiasm has caught on. Early this month, students at Lewis and Clark College voted to tax themselves an extra $10 per year to fund programs to achieve Kyoto compliance. The “offsets” would pay for carbon-cutting measures off campus, such as installing fluorescent lights in local homes.

State governments have also been moving forward. New Jersey has pledged to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by 3.5% below 1990 levels by 2005. Last August, the governors of six New England states and premiers of seven Eastern Canadian provinces agreed to roll back emissions by 25% by 2012.

Capitol Hill, too, seems much more concerned about global warming than the Oval Office. Last year, a climate-change caucus was formed in the House of Representatives that now includes more than 70 members of both political parties. And there are now more than 60 legislative proposals on global warming, encompassing everything from reducing CO2 emissions from power plants to paying farmers to cultivate plants that sequester greenhouse gases to--just imagine--actually developing a national strategy with the goal of stabilizing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at a level safe for continued human life.

A weekend before Bush announced his plan, I was in Portland, Ore., attending an unprecedented organizing conference for students committed to confronting climate change. The nearly 90 participants had flown in from all over the country, with backpacks and sleeping bags, to trade information on how to catalog their campuses’ greenhouse-gas emissions and get their college administrations to start cutting.

“It’s the making of a movement,” said Charlene Garland, associate director of the nonprofit group Clean Air-Cool Planet, which is trying to accelerate the trend by offering logistical help to communities, campuses and corporations. “People aren’t waiting for government leadership, but are moving ahead because they know the problem is real.”

For the students I spoke with, the problem is also painfully personal. That’s because they can imagine some serious effects of climate change by the time they reach the average politician’s age--not least of which may be increasingly potent resentment of the United States, as less-developed nations suffer the brunt of the initial effects, and the world finds itself awash in environmental refugees. They also take seriously predictions of a generally worsening quality of life, as U.S. coastlines are threatened and more species become extinct.

So much for Bush’s rationale when he backed out of Kyoto, that “first things first are the people who live in America.” With past controversies over the science of climate change rapidly fading away, many Americans have come to appreciate the ways in which this looming threat could strike close to home.

Grass-roots action can help to raise awareness of these problems, but it’s not nearly enough to meet the challenge we face as a nation and a species. Scientists tell us that just to stabilize the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere, and halt the warming trend, we must eventually reduce our emissions by at least 70%. That’s a serious international task, requiring a courageous leader in the White House--a far cry from the fair-weather friend we have now.

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Katherine Ellison is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose most recent book, with Gretchen Daily, “The New Economy of Nature: The Quest to Make Conservation Profitable,” will be published in April.